
Book C B 

Cop>Tigtit}l^ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



OUT OF EGYPT 

' The Wings of the Morning." 

' Out of Egypt have I called my Son. 




A NUBIAN VKNUOk t)F TRINKETS 



OUT OF EGYPT 



M. ELIZABETH GROUSE 



ILLUSTRATED BY PHOTOGRAPHS 




Boston: Richard G. Badger 

the 60rham press 

The Copp Clark Co., limited 

TORONTO 



Copyright 191^, hy Richard G. Badger 
All rights reserved 



^4 



MAR 2J i3i4 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 

■ ©CIA362087 
1^t 



TO 
MY FRIEND 




INTRGDUGTION 

NE morning in Cairo the author was 
:alking with a young American coUec- 
'tor. "When you know Egypt,'* he 
said, proudly handling a beautiful little 
figure of Osiris, "you cease to believe anything. 
You find that thousands of years ago, the Egyp- 
tians had in their religion all the things which you 
believed!" 

Others, who know Egypt more superficially, 
frequently make similar remarks. But, as the 
collector spoke, a strong feeling came to the author 
that the discovery of these religious ideas in Egypt, 
should not give a denial j but rather a confirmation 
to our own belief. 

So she set herself seriously to study what the 
explorers and the historians have to tell. That 
she has expressed in this volume what she found 
is due to the need of which she became conscious 
in her studies, the need for something to express 
Egypt as a whole. 

Therefore: This book is neither a guide book nor 
a history, but a series of essays combining the 
descriptions incident to the Nile journey, with 
historical sequence and religious significance, in an 
endeavor to progressively reveal the development 
of Egypt and its place in the development of the 



8 INTRODUCTION 

world. The excellent guide-books, while giving 
many details, are necessarily fragmentary, and 
assume a background of connected knowledge 
which they require for full intelligibility. On the 
other hand, of large and technical books there is 
no end. Whole histories and studies of special 
periods or phases, these are the great store-houses 
of the knowledge of the Past, the gift to the Present 
of men, who, through prodigious and untiring 
labor and life-long devotion have opened up the 
earth and unsealed the inscriptions, permitting us 
to enter the mystic world that was before us. A 
sight of the "treasures of darkness" awakens the 
wonder of that labor, and makes the writer, whom 
these wise men have admitted to that Past, but 
who has not held a spade or a cipher, very humble 
in offering her guidance to others. Yet few read- 
ers or travellers have time to learn for themselves 
all that the savants have produced — the interpre- 
tation of which changes so rapidly, that the knowl- 
edge of twenty-five years ago is completely revised, 
and in some cases, reversed. A book based upon 
the recent findings, which should combine descrip- 
tion with history and religious interpretation, 
might, by revealing Egypt, as an articulate whole, 
give a coherent answer to many a question. 
Therefore, the author has taken the tourist's 
route, and by aid of the lamps most recently pro- 
vided, has tried to show jthe ancient buildings in 
this illumination. In describing ithem with suffi- 
cient detail, as she hopes, to make the book useful 



INTRODUCTION 9 

in each place, she has told the stories of these 
ruins, endeavoring to put the life into each, and to 
show the special idea each stands for in the history 
of Egypt and in the development of the theological 
thought of the world. 

At the same time, though it is not a guide-book, 
the author trusts this little volume may be found 
a very thorough guide to Karnak, the centre of 
Egypt, both in historical and religious importance. 

"Before the Temple" is a survey of the religious 
organization of Egypt, which story suggests the 
true significance of the Temple; in "The House of 
Amon" will be found the separate stories of the 
Empire kings; and in the "Message" from Abydos, 
Edfu, and Philae, — the sacred places of the Osirian 
worship, — the inner message of Egypt to the 
world. 

The author's thought is based especially upon 
the historical facts given to the English-speaking 
world by the translations and history of Prof. J. 
H. Breasted, who has worked with the German 
Egyptologists, and by the explorations and pro- 
found researches of Prof. Wm. Flinders Petrie, to 
both of whom the present writer acknowledges 
her deep indebtedness : — to Breasted for historical 
facts and sequences, and to Petrie for the charac- 
ters and history of the gods. She is also indebted 
for the story of the finding of the Pharaohs to 
Ganon Rawnsley's account. Others also, among 
them Budge, Brugsch-Bey and Ebers, have helped 
to reveal Egypt to her. 



10 INTRODUCTION 

|In spelling the proper names, Breasted's simple 
renderings have been generally adhered to. The 
Egyptians spelled only with consonants, thus al- 
lowing some latitude to the imagination of our age 
in filling in the vowel sounds. Ikhnaton, Khuena- 
ten and Akhetaten are the same; Thutmose, 
Thothmes, and Tahutimi. Those who have read 
much of Egypt will find their friends under one set 
of these forms. The arrangement itself of the 
Egyptian syllables is not always certain, and some 
well-known names are recognizable by their tef- 
minations as Greek translations, such as Amen- 
ophis for the more accruately Egyptian Amenho- 
tep. In this connection it may be interesting to 
note that a discovery of cuneiform tablets on the 
site of the capital city of the Hittites, has thrown 
new light upon this matter of pronunciation, as 
also do the earlier found Tell-el-Amarna letters 
which contain the names of Egyptian kings. 
Among the Hittite tablets is the treaty with Ram- 
ese II, of which we have long known the Egyptian 
copy on the Karnak wall. Its rendering, accord- 
ing to "Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of 
Recent Researches," comes near to our old pro- 
nunciation of Rameses' long name, and seems to 
indicate that Prof. Maspero's and also the German 
system of restored pronunciation are neither of 
them quite right. We shall probably never be 
absolutely sure. But fortunately, some method 
of shortening is used by all modern writers, from 
Greece onward, for the names of these kings; just 



INTRODUCTION 11 

as the kings of the present day are called but by 
one of their many appellations. The full name of 
the great Rameses as we popularly know him, was 
User Maat - Ra - setep - en - Ra - Ra - meri - su - meri - A- 
men, or as others give the first part, Setepnere, Re 
or Ra signifying the same god. 

With earnest appreciation of a meaning in 
Egypt, the author presents this review of her Nile 
journey, for which she has chosen from the most 
important, those things which are typical, or which 
were necessary to the working out of her thought. 
When all the details possible have been seen, and 
when the quiet time comes after, much drops away 
and is lost in the sweep of the great desert, while 
from the distance those things of great significance 
stand out. When we come to think it over, from 
our individual standpoints, we ask ourselves two 
questions: What has made the greatest impression .^^ 
And what did it all mean.^^ For we must all be 
able to give an answer in order to satisfy ourselves, 
and to have some expression, some outlet, for the 
wonder which oppresses our souls. This little 
volume is the answer one traveller has made to 
these questions. If it help to grace another's 
journey, to make Egypt more clear or coherent for 
another, it will have served its purpose. 

M. E. C. 

PariSy December, 1913, 



CONTENTS 

Chapter page 

I. The Desert 19 

II. On the Threshold 24 

ni. Egypt, the Dawn 33 

IV. The River 45 

V. From the Love Story of Egypt. 64 

VI. Before the Temple 88 

VII. The House of Amon 102 

Vin. The Valley of the Shadow 134 

IX. The City of the King 142 

X. Israel in Egypt 155 

XI. The Evening and the Morning 183 

XII. A Message from the Holy Places .... 193 

XIII. The Haunt of Horus 204 

XIV. The Gift of Egypt 214 

XV. Light 231 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

A Nubian Vender of Trinkets. ..... .Frontispiece ^ 

TO FACE PAGE 

The Day's Last Load 20^- 

The Carriage of the Khedive 26 ^ 

The Most Important University of Moham- 
medanism 30 t^ 

The Modern City 40 «- 

The Boats by the Edge of the River 50 ^ 

A Shadouf 58 t. 

The River at Thebes 66 i 

Out of the Past Come Figures. 80 ^^ 

The Family in Egypt 96 t 

A Nile Village 120^ 

Our Rowers in the Lock 136 "^ 

Egyptian Sugar Cane and Humble Egyptian 
Homes. 156 

Down by the River 180 

Our Villa 200^ 

Water Jars 220 



OUT OF EGYPT 



OUT OF EGYPT 

CHAPTER I 

The Desert 

IT is the desert — one cannot say the centre of 
the desert, or its heart, for there seem no 
boundaries. At first all is without form and 
void, it is that which lies back of the Begin- 
ning. We may speak of the desert expression of 
Egypt, though the desert has many expressions; 
for, while sometimes interrupted by the whirlwind, 
they all seem the expressions of one reverie; which 
reaches its height at noon when life is fullest and 
stillest, and we wait breathless for what is to come. 
Then do we feel how God thought, and the world 
is. 

From this mood we lift up our eyes to the hills 
which give us one background, and we realize they 
are not of the shifting sand, but their foundations 
are sure. They are, in truth, the oldest hills, first 
to be raised above the waters, and though they are 
all barren, among them are cool purple shades, 
"the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land." 

Under the spell it casts upon us, we journey in 
the desert. Motion incarnate is the camel, step- 

19 



20 OUT OF EGYPT 

ping so softly that as we ride, it is the earth which 
seems to reel, yet in the throes of creation. At 
last before us rise liie first and greatest monuments 
of Man, announcing the beginning of Time where 
they first marked Space; and deep in a hollow, 
lifting itself from the drifting sands, we find Form 
emerging, clothing Majesty — a human head. 

Still, after the brief span of human history, it 
represents the mystery, which we have called by 
name. For that Time and Space and Form might 
be, one more thing is essential* the Word — the 
name of each. Without this word, in the days of 
dawn men felt that nothing could exist, and further 
believed that the knowledge of a name gave power 
over its owner; since the name is the word for the 
idea of the thing, and thus represents its soul. 

But this word is not the Sphinx's secret. We 
had recognized its name ourselves, ere we learned 
that the god for whom it stood, is thus addressed 
in a hymn of the Egyptians: 

"O Form, one, creator of all things, O one, only, 
maker of existences." 

Uncovered from the sands, as its inscriptions 
tell us, by an early ruler in obedience to a dream; 
and gazing into the morning with wide, unseeing 
eyes through the centuries, what mystery of primi- 
tive religion, what revelation of Truth, does the 
Sphinx embody.? 

Below its feet, in the shadow of the Pyramids, 
where the river brings life to the desert, the women 
of Egypt draw water. 



THE DESERT U 

The melancholy note of a large bird calls from 
the valley; small wagtailis flit by us; and a Semitic 
Bedouin boy in white comes flying from Nowhere 
on a gaunt camel, waving his arms in sheer exuber- 
ance of life. Near us, a company of graceful 
chfldren, clad each in one loose garment, are busily 
carrying away the earth to uncover some further 
marvel of the morning of Time. 

We stand beside the Sphinx, with the sun behind 
us now, and follow its gaze across the tender green 
of the Nile plain; over the shimmer of the river; 
over the modern city, to the hills rose-colored in 
the evening light. Those are the hills from which 
these first great monuments were wrested — the 
hills of our first delight. We know that tonight 
trains of camels are carrying down the day's last 
load of stone from the edge of the ancient quarries 
to the boats by the river bank. It is over there, 
in that continuation of the desert, that One Other 
and I have taken up our abode, there where the 
yellow sands sweep round us, and the heavens 
open above these distant Pyramids for the golden 
afterglow. 



Back in our village Helouan, from dawn until 
"the purple earthshadow climbs the mellow-east- 
ern sky, "* we watch the changes in the Mokattam 
Hills. After dark itself has fallen, comes a lifting 

*R. Talbot Kelly. 



22 OUT OF EGYPT 

of the curtain, and the second glow shines out fine 
and strange, like the light from a golden lamp; 
while the rock seems to glow from within. Here, 
shut from all the world, yet with all space about 
us, we are daily learning the meanings of what we 
have seen and heard. 

Our villa, the salemhk of an Eastern palace, lies 
in a garden. The garden is an artificial oasis, but 
in it the desert blossoms, and nowhere else is the 
rose so precious. The few houses are the color of 
the sand, from which they seem hardly separated, 
reflecting the sunsets in the same way. Some of 
these buildings are harems, bound round with this 
monotony of sand. By degrees it is the details 
which we notice — every rider, every black-robed 
figure, stands out strongly, till in isolated bits we 
spell the Present, the ephemeral, eternal life of 
today, in which we are to have our part. Curious 
topsy-turvydom, strange anomaly of ancient and 
modern. East and West. There is much in the 
situation to amuse us, much which seems irrecon- 
cilable. 

[It is modern life, our Western civilization, which 
intrudes itself from the hotel to our villa and flut- 
ters over the great expanse of desert. "My first 
horse-back ride was on an elephant,*' said the very 
large American woman; "my second, on a camel; 
my third, on a donkey." For us, the saddles are 
now often on the donkeys, two little brothers, 
named Black Diamond and Little Joe respectively. 

Little Joe is long and lean, and shows in particu- 



THE DESERT 23 

lar the trait supposed to be most characteristic. 
His obstinacy will allow no other donkey to get 
ahead of him. When Black Diamond steps up. 
Little Joe steps out, and gaining with his long 
stride, heads my donkey off. Neither persuasion 
nor force can turn his head. Black Diamond, with 
good nature, but a like obstinacy, tries again; and 
so we zigzag fom side to side of the road, a process 
which rather accelerates our arrival, since we make 
up by the impetus of the racing impulse, for the 
extra ground covered. 

On the broad desert, however. Black Diamond 
has a chance. From our saddles the Other and I 
feel the freedom and charm of the free, golden 
desert, where even lowly Egyptians walk with the 
sweep of Victory. 



CHAPTER II 

On the Threshold 

IT was at Cairo, three full moons ago, that we 
began our journey into the far land of Egypt 
— Cairo, the new life of Memphis, the city of 
Saladin's Citadel, and Aladdin's wonderful 
lamp, the portal to the passage which leads to the 
Beginning. 

Here we were initiated to the spirit of the land, 
to the poetry and symbolism of the East, by the 
Mahmal celebration attending the starting of the 
Mecca caravan. Once every year pilgrims from 
Cairo, with others gathered from many lands, go 
on their long journey to bring refreshment from 
the fountain of the most wide-spread religion in the 
world, Mohammedanism; and in the open square 
of the city, where the ceremonies took place, we 
saw the Orient rise to life as by some magic of the 
Arabian Nights. 

The setting was historic. Before us towered the 
Citadel of Saladin. Whoever may be the Moham- 
medans' greatest romantic hero and representative 
to themselves, — perhaps it is Haroun-ar-Rashid, — 
Saladin is the most romantic figure and the finest 
representative of El-Islam to Christendom. For 
it was Christendom with which, as concentrated 

u 



ON THE THRESHOLD 25 

in its Crusades, he contended |for the jHttle King- 
dom of Jerusalem. At that time he proved his 
knightly qualities by his kindness to his enemy, 
Richard, the Lionhearted, to whom, as the old 
story is told, he sent snow from the mountains when 
Richard lay ill of a fever. The story at least 
typifies the spirit of the East. Such courtesies, as 
well as many other things in the Oriental civiliza- 
tion, were then beyond the comprehension of 
youthful Europe; and the Crusaders took back 
many ideas more valuable to them than the pathe- 
tic little kingdom, surrounded by the desert of an 
unknown religion, which they abandoned to those 
sweeping sands hundreds of years ago. 

In the story of the Citadel of Cairo is compassed 
much of the story of Mohammedanism. 

The height is now crowned by the Mosque of 
Mohammed Ali, founder of the reigning dynasty. 
It was built early in the last century and is copied 
from the great mosque of Constantinople, the 
present capital of the Mohammedan world. 

At the foot of the Citadel, on the occasion of this 
Mahmal celebration, was placed the throne of the 
Khedive. And close beside us stood the sacred 
camel, waiting to receive the Mahmal, which is 
the gold-embroidered canopy that symbolizes 
royalty. How still he stood, the proudest of all 
camels, never used but for these holy journeys; 
with what strange silence he received his burden ; 
while a cordon of soldiers closed around him to 
protect him from too many touches of the throng- 



26 OUT OF EGYPT 

ing crowd of faithful, and thus incidentally, to pre- 
vent the faithful from obtaining too many bless- 
ings ! One old man fought desperately and persis- 
tently to reach him. Again and again the soldiers 
thrust the seeker back, and the master of ceremonies 
rode up threateningly on his white horse. At last 
all was ready — battalions of soldiers stood waiting, 
the attendant camels in gorgeous trappings were 
mounted, and all were motionless — except that 
two of the animals turned their heads slowly and 
observantly, and chewed reminiscently. Even 
the dervish water and lemonade-carriers and 
the cake-boys who had moved among the throng, 
became transfixed with expectancy. Everything 
awaited the arrival of the Khedive. 

Suddenly the band struck up, four white-robed 
runners dashed into view on the further side of the 
square, a four-horse carriage drew up before the 
throne, — and the Khedive had come. The lines 
of soldiers widened to form an avenue for the 
camels; and to monotonous, rhythmic, Arab music 
the procession started, the long rhythmic stride 
of the Mahmal-bearer scarcely swaying the canopy. 
Around in a circle some four times they passed, 
then crossed to the Khedive that he might kiss the 
rope of the sacred camel, and went out at the 
farther side. 

There followed an imposing review of the Egyp- 
tian army, some of whom were to escort the cara- 
van. Then the carriages drove away; and, when 
the guards were released, the crowd surged over 



ON THE THRESHOLD rt 

the square, as a mighty rush of water when a dam 
is broken. Not a foot of ground in that great 
open space, so ample for the review, was now 
visible. It was the annual religious flood-tide in 
the people's lives. 

This is Egypt, this is Mohammedanism. 

Strains and fragments of its poetry recur through 
the modern life of Cairo. The beautiful white- 
robed runners, the short-lived Sais, precede the 
carriages; veiled and black-robed women move 
about, carrying their naked babies astride their 
shoulders, as did Egyptian women of old. And 
water-carriers are everywhere: — some with the 
skins of unfiltered Nile water; others w4th jars of 
filtered water on their backs, from wliich by bend- 
ing, they may pour the liquid over their shoulders 
into little cups; and still others with large glass 
bottles slung before them containing lemonade. 

These water-carriers are all dervishes, but we 
see nothing here or in their ceremonies of this 
religious aspect of their lives. The ceremonies of 
the howling and dancing dervishes to which for- 
eigners are admitted are but a travesty upon their 
genuine religion. 

As we followed the crowd back into the town, 
we realized how two architectural beauties mark 
the background of this Eastern life — everywhere 
the lacy, heaven-aspiring minarets and the fast 
vanishing " mashrabiyeh " windows. The name 
given to these beaded woodwork windows signifies 
"place of water" and was originally applied only 



28 OUT OF EGYPT 

to that projecting portion where the water was set 
to keep cool. They have their romance too, these 
windows, since they form the screened balconies 
through which the women peer down upon the 
world. Unfortunately, much of the woodwork 
has now been stripped from the houses and carried 
away bodily to make screens in Western homes.* 
This denudes Cairo of one of its chief graces — and 
under the present law the balconies may not be 
replaced for fear of fire. 

One still sees in the bazaars the fascinating 
equipment of Eastern life; alluring because that 
life is so hidden from us, and the possession of its 
externals seems to give an entrance to it, at least, 
suggests its mysteries. But it is to be regretted 
that most of the contact of Europeans with natives 
is through bargaining — a most superficial contact 
and often entirely without understanding on the 
part of the Westerners, who condemn what they 
consider Oriental dishonesty. Yet they them- 
selves do not seriously object to getting a bargain; 
why should they be disturbed at the Oriental 
attempt to make one? To the credit of the native 
be it said that it is a game which he enjoys most 
when his adversary comprehends it. Europeans 
and Americans are prone to treat other peoples 
with a superior contempt which does not facilitate 
understanding. The Oriental has a different 
standard of right and wrong, but he has his own 

*The hotels in Egypt possess beautiful examples. Mena House 
has the finest collection. 



ON THE THRESHOLD ^ 

deep sense of honor. His simple and childlike 
intensity of feeling is accompanied and safe-guard- 
ed by a profound reserve. It often leads him to 
display the opposite of his true seK, — as Lane 
makes clear, — and few indeed, among the students 
of the Orient, has he trusted suflBciently to admit 
them to the secrets of his inner life. 

The bazaars of Cairo do not compare with those 
of Tunis, which is a far more Oriental city. Yet 
they suggest the Arabian Nights; and the building 
in which we found the chief of them, charmed us 
with a spell far different and deeper. For the 
narrow street runs through the Khan-el-Khahl, a 
house of the same idea as the khan or inn at Bethle- 
hem — the first kind of hotel, a building into which 
the caravans of olden time came and were unload- 
ed. The goods were placed on the ground floor 
and sold there, while the merchants lodged above 
them. In Mediaeval days commerce meant travel 
and adventure. Venice, the gateway from the 
East to the West, possesses such a building erected 
for the merchants, with sculptured camels to indi- 
cate its use. Cairo was once full of khans. 

It was the Mohammedan Arabs of the Middle 
Ages who, as a Semitic people, living an Old Testa- 
ment life, cast upon Egypt and the Egyptians the 
glamour of the East, and became to Christian 
Europe which strove with them, a living illustra- 
tion of the West-adopted Bible story. 

In Cairo one finds today the most important 
university of Mohammedanism in the Mosque of 



80 OUT OF EGYPT 

El-Azhar, with its seven thousand scholars from 
different parts of the Mohammedan world "all 
seated on the ground." The students from each 
country have a room to themselves. 

Geography has been introduced into the curri- 
culum only within the last few years. Wonderful 
is the delight of the teachers in their new appli- 
ances; but we were told that students, beholding 
Cairo as a pin-head on the map of Africa, refuse 
to beheve. Is not Cairo the great centre of the 
world? — the rest but a small fringe or margin? 

It is the study of Koran Arabic and the memor- 
izing of that holy book by writing it, which occupy 
most of the school life of these youths. The class- 
es, if such they can be called, are innumerable 
Kttle groups, each about a teacher, the members 
of each being near of an age. Many a little circle 
we find of Kindergarten years. Quiet, industrious 
and subdued under the stern watchfulness of their 
teachers, the gleam of their eyes reveals their 
native merriment and life. Is it this quality that 
keeps them cheery under conditions which our 
spoiled babies could not survive? They are writ- 
ing with clumsy little fingers passages of the Koran, 
or perhaps the ninety-and-nine beautiful names of 
God, which are for them the beginning of knowl- 
edge. This method reminds us of the scholastic 
period of education in Europe — with this difference, 
that the motive beneath and through the Moham- 
medan learning is faith. 

It is within the mosques that we see Moham- 
medanism in its most ideal and poetic aspect. 



ON THE THRESHOLD 31 

Five times a day at hours prescribed and in the 
eight positions of prayer must the devout Mo- 
hammedan praise God. If he is in his Httle shop 
in the bazaars and cannot get away to the mosque, 
he must, at the nearest possible moment to that 
which is ordained, drop down upon his prayer- 
rug facing Mecca, and withdrawing his eyes from 
the world about him, repeat those worshipful ex- 
pressions which constitute his contemplation of 
the Universal. It is a curious and suggestive 
picture. The small open shop is raised somewhat 
above the ground, so that we commonly sit on the 
edge of the floor as on a bench, to bargain. At 
prayer time, the walls form a frame, enclosing the 
rich background of rugs and Eastern ornaments, 
and the one white figure, with its look of inner 
absorption. 

But somehow this picture reminds us of that 
Eastern praying on street corners, once so simply 
and so strongly condemned. 

In the mosque, it is different, when the wor- 
shippers, having bathed hands and feet like the 
Hebrew priests of old, at the holy fountain of ab- 
lutions in the court, walk barefoot on to the holy 
ground and seem to enter into the silence. 

The Mosque of Sultan Hassan, in the shadow of 
the Citadel, is the finest in Cairo. Its magnificent 
door is perhaps the most exquisite example of 
Arabic stalactite work in Egypt. But it is the 
cracked old walls which have for us a peculiar 
fascination, for this mosque was built from the 



82 OUT OF EGYPT 

Great Pyramid. We know that those old stones 
were quarried thousands of years ago, near our 
present abiding-place; were taken across to the 
western side of the river, and over the hard road 
of the pyramid builder to be an inner coating of 
the mighty tomb of Cheops. Memphis faded 
when the glory of Alexandria arose; and later, the 
ancient city was destroyed that the stones of 
Memphis might become Cairo on the eastern 
river-bank. Then these blocks were retransported 
to receive new life — I had almost said, to enclose 
the latest chapter in the story of the ancient build- 
ing; but the mosque is already tottering, and the 
Pyramid will continue to be when the beautiful 
Mohammedan temple has perished. 

In our imagination the crumbling walls already 
fall apart and we pass through the portal of the 
East, back toward the Beginning of the West. 



CHAPTER III 

Egypt, the Dawn. 

AS in the sunset skies and the desert sands 
the color of barren Egypt is marvellous, 
so is it with the life of the people. The 
color is the revelation of Egypt: yellow 
houses, whose chief beauty is their woodwork; 
mixed costumes of all colors; dark faces. It is 
true that the white Semitic Orient of other coun- 
tries seems to mean a finer development, while it 
yet speaks of that early stage wliich possesses 
spiritual revelation and which belongs to the East. 
But the color of Egypt is the color of dawn, present 
now in the sunset, — yea, it is the color out of 
which the white light of eternal day is made. 

It was the Past which drew us in the stones of 
Cairo, yet the way back seemed long at first. We 
felt that we possessed a clue for ourselves when we 
could decipher a few hieroglyphic signs. So each 
individual may have the feeling of a discoverer. 
Gradually the Past absorbed us, until Egypt be- 
longed to the ancient Egyptians — all that has hap- 
pened since seemed accident and impertinence. 
The magnitude of the Past overcame us, and a 
magic drew us into the spirit of those far-off times. 

33 



34 OUT OF EGYPT 

Egypt, from Cairo to Philae, the Gem of the 
Nile, — Egypt is the museum of the world, with a 
poetry of symboHsm in a romance of stories which 
clings to it all. Those stories form part of the 
foundation of our own. The museum in Cairo is 
Egypt's heart, where are now gathered together 
and protected the mystic treasures which are 
found: jewelry of queens and princesses; scarabs 
with the names of kings; papyri; gods and god- 
desses; and the ushabtis, "little answerers," figures 
of servants buried with the dead, so that when the 
spirit is called to work in the Afterworld, they may 
answer for him, "Here am I!" 

What poetry we find in the Egyptian titles: 
"The Book of Portals" and the "Book of that 
which is in the Underworld!" The Egyptian idea 
of the Ka or double, with its sign of the upHfted 
arms was as the Hindoos' "Astral body;" and 
their thought of the after-life, like that of the Mo- 
hammedans today, was the thought of a long 
journey. 

Wonderful old Egyptians, who divided Time in- 
to our calendar, long before history began; who 
measured the hours of the day and night and saw a 
symbol for each; who first wrote of the seven ages 
of Man! Back through Rome and Greece, with- 
out a break, we can trace in Egypt the beginnings 
of our science, of our material civilization. And 
beyond all this there is something, formal still, but 
more profound than all. 

There came a moment when, in the royal room 



EGYPT THE DAWN 35 

of the museum we gazed face to face upon the 
Pharaohs. That is where the spell was laid upon 
our own lives, through our deepest feeling. Here, 
with his strong, still, old face uncovered, is the 
second Rameses, Rameses, the Great, father of 
Pharaoh's daughter. Merneptah, his son, the 
Pharaoh of the Exodus, is also here, but his body 
has never been unwrapped. Because of the He- 
brew story, there are those who refuse to believe 
that it is he, and we know that his own tomb ap- 
pears as if unused. But the Israelites made their 
record after looking from the other side of the 
waters in a moment of intense excitement and re- 
lief. There is every reason to suppose that Egyp- 
tian troops may have been overwhelmed in the 
sand at the head of the Red Sea, but Merneptah 
was not with them and escaped. 

These, then, are the Pharaohs, whose story was 
told us when, in our own form of religion, incul- 
cated in childhood, we were taught reverence. 
And the deeper we advance into this mysterious 
land, the more in its broadest sense do we realize 
that religion is the secret of Egypt, the secret of 
the Beginning. 

Under the spell which conquered the interest of 
the Present, we visited again and yet again the 
Pyramids. 

Bronze lions guard the entrance to the bridge, 
over which, while it was closed against the river 
traffic, we passed in the midst of carriages, laden 
camels, wide-panniered, jostling donkeys, and 



36 OUT OF EGYPT 

pedestrians. From a garden at the other end, a 
tram carried us along the beautiful road. This 
road was constructed for the pilgrimage of the 
Empress Eugenie to these wonders of ancient 
Egypt at the time when the Kliedive Ismail built 
Ghezireh Palace for her reception, and when he 
entertained her with such splendid f^tes as the 
world has scarcely seen and only an Oriental 
imagination could conceive. But a Western world 
was obliged to take charge of the financial side of 
Ismail's affairs, and Ismail died, broken-hearted, 
in exile in Constantinople. The Empress Eugenie, 
bereaved in a different way of her empire, — of her 
husband and her son, wanders sometimes in her 
dahabieh up the Nile and through the land of 
Egypt. Ghezireh Palace is an hotel, and this 
road of proud remembrance is the highway of the 
camel of the Bedouin and the carriage of the 
European. Occasionally a horse appears in gor- 
geous Oriental trappings. The tramway runs 
along one side of the way under a row of magnifi- 
cent trees; and thus we approached the first to be 
built and the last to survive of the Seven Wonders 
of the World. We dropped the Present when we 
stood beneath it — the Great Pyramid — over- 
whelmed by its size and the fineness of its masonry. 
Such piles of stone, royal Mountains of Man, 
rise, breaking the desert for twenty miles on the 
western side of the river, but this Ghizeh group 
alone are "The Pyramids" to us all. They are an 
ennead standing for a dynasty, though only the 
three largest are generally known. 



EGYPT THE DAWN 37 

The position, the proportions, and the relations 
to one another of these three pyramids, reveal 
remarkable knowledge of direction, geometry, and 
principles of construction; they fill us now with 
amazement at the methods by which in that non- 
mechanical age, such prodigious weights were 
handled. As the outcome of their revelations, the 
Pyramids have furnished material for whole chap- 
ters, and even volumes, upon their secret signi- 
ficance. With what amount of conscious knowl- 
edge of occult meanings, these buildings were con- 
structed, we can hardly know, but that which is 
true must prove mathematically true in all the 
larger knowledge of relations by which it may be 
tested. Therefore the Great Pyramid is considered 
by some a key to the whole philosophy of sacred 
numeration. 

We stand where centuries of golden sand have 
beat about its base, slowly or swiftly have drifted 
or swept on it, and after all surged softly past. 
And it rests firm, a universal symbol, for us to read 
and comprehend at last. 

The Egyptians, the first historic nation, and the 
first nation of the West, with whom lay our earliest 
beginnings of objective knowledge, here expressed 
their own strong sense of the material realm, the 
world of Form. Here they raised at the Begin- 
ning, "the most stupendous mass of masonry ever 
put together by human hands;" for it must cast 
the longest shadow over Time. It marks for us 
our entrance to the Past. 



38 OUT OF EGYPT 

However, the Pyramid not only expresses this 
particular idea, but the Old Kingdom itself at its 
height. As Breasted suggests, it is the early state, 
here wrought into a tomb, beneath the apex of a 
single block. For the nation belonged to the 
king, whose control was absolute, with his sons and 
the members of his family next beneath him, their 
lives all given to making a material "eternal house" 
for the body of the great king who was to them a 
god. Thus the Old Kingdom has perpetuated 
itself. 

Through all the changing hours of the long day 
the Pyramids stand the same, yet different. We 
loved them best in the evening light, when, free 
from the distractions of donkeys and guides, we 
slipped around the corner of the greatest, and 
went south, along the path between it and its 
family of three. Beyond these, looking along the 
valley and the desert plateau, we saw, as it were, 
a vast amphitheatre of sand, smooth as a circular 
sweep of snowdrift. In a hollow below us, per- 
petually arising through the earth was that ma- 
jestic human head. We went down before the 
Sphinx, seeking its mystery which is never fully 
revealed. 

Strange stories cluster round this head. It is 
not the Woman of the Greeks, but once represented 
a finite human king and then a god. Its inscrip- 
tions tell how Thutmose IV of the eighteenth 
dynasty dreamed of, discovered, and uncovered 
it from the sands. And it is still surreptitiously 
appealed to. 



EGYPT THE DAWN 39 

Just beyond it is a temple, sometime known as 
the Temple of the Sphinx, but now discovered to 
be only the giant gateway to the Second Pyramid. 
We look down into it, as it lies excavated, and 
realize what a Past is buried here. This gate was 
on the edge of the desert plateau, so that in flood- 
time boats came to its steps. From it, as from the 
others, belonging to the other Pyramids, the white- 
robed priests entered an inclined and covered 
causeway, leading up to the Pyramid enclosure. 
And all was white — gate and causeway and royal 
tomb, — save when lighted golden by the Sun. 
The king, whom the people wrought for, but rarely 
caught a glimpse of, was to them a god. Authori- 
ty was from the first supposed to be divine. 

The people dwelt in Memphis, the "White 
Wall," below. Upon a day we visited its site. 
That capital of the Ancient Empire and largest 
city of the New — Memphis of ^Ye thousand years 
and millions of inhabitants — is gone like the grass 
of the field — gone, to be endowed with new life in 
the city across the river. 

In a lonely palm grove, where once stood the 
magnificent temple of Ptah, is the only representa- 
tive of Memphis in her living glory — Rameses II, 
in two great prostrate statues. They unlock for us 
the story of Egypt; their loneliness is full of signi- 
ficance. It is Rameses, who, more than any other, 
represents the whole of Egypt, not only in the 
greatness of his reign and achievements, but in his 
connection with the Hebrews. He stands for one 



40 OUT OF EGYPT 

stage in the development of Man, Moses stands 
for the next. 

Perhaps in no country of the world is history so 
personal, so completely included in the lives of the 
rulers. We are personally interested because much 
that belongs to our own lives had its source in 
Egypt; and the stories of the kings are spread out 
before us as an open book along the Nile, — in 
statues, in inscriptions, in paintings, in the very 
bodies themselves. The life of Rameses, the 
Rameses of Hebrew story, is revealed to us in de- 
tail almost from the day of his birth. 

Time in Egypt is reckoned by the lives of kings ; 
and in those early ages the mass of the people, 
being practically slaves, did only the will of the 
ruler and were truly included in his life. In 
Rameses, more than any other, is summed up the 
whole genius of Egypt at its height. He stands 
for his country, not only in his own period, but 
through all periods after, and for all time. It is 
the "Land of Rameses." 

Memphis is gone, save for the great king, who, 
prostrate, merely rests, serene and unconquerable 
in his green grove, bearing the image of his favorite 
daughter, Bent-Anat, on his side. Time enough 
has passed for everything to drop away from him 
here, yet he remains alone, and all the greater for 
that loneliness. 

Ptah, the pylons of whose huge temple, behind 
the figures Petrie unearthed in 1909-1910, was 
Rameses' favorite deity and was one of the oldest 



EGYPT THE DAWN 41 

and most venerated of the Egyptian gods. It was 
"he who not only made the germ of life, but its 
conditions and laws, he who was beginner and 
beginning." In him they saw the father of men 
and of their gods. His high -priesthood was a 
high honor in Egypt, often held by the kings' sons. 
One of Rameses' own older sons bore it; and a 
younger one, Merneptah, who reigned after him, 
was named for Ptah. 

Though the Egyptian priests became initiated 
to some conception of a universal god, they taught 
the people to see his attributes under various 
tangible forms, and each priesthood claimed su- 
premacy for the particular form it served. To the 
Egyptian people the idea of divinity personified by 
Ptah, dwelt in the Sacred Bull, which bore certain 
curious and definite markings. When one of these 
bulls died, his successor, to be recognized by the 
markings, was searched for and was sure to be 
found. 

Ptah was always represented by the figure of 
the bull. No wonder the Israelites, living as they 
had in the Delta country to which Memphis was 
the key, could not feel at home when they went 
out into the wilderness without a golden calf! 

Rameses himself had been in the north as a 
youth. When he was a king, and his campaigns 
called him into the northeast, he lived almost en- 
tirely in the Delta country, to be nearer the field 
of action. This explains the story of the finding 
of Moses by Rameses' young daughter near the 



42 OUT OF EGYPT 

university city of On or Heliopolis, which Rameses 
sometimes used as a residence instead of Memphis. 
Finally, he placed his capital at Tanis, near the 
north-eastern border, that he might in person 
guard the gate to his dominion. Of the two re- 
cently discovered treasure cities* in the Delta, 
built of bricks of Nile mud, and believed, accord- 
ing to the Hebrew traditions, to have been con- 
structed by them for Rameses, one city bears his 
name; and a brick, now in the Berlin Museum, is 
inscribed with the same cartouche, "User-Maat- 
Ra-setep-en-Ra, " the prenomen which we learn 
to know so well. The making of bricks was the 
Israelites' task, and the order to "make bricks 
without straw," or, more accurately, to find the 
straw which was no longer provided and still to 
produce the same number of bricks, was the op- 
pression which caused the Hebrews finally to rise 
and move out. Thus they became a nation. Is 
not that brick as the cornerstone of a new order? 

To the south of the Temple of Ptah, Petrie ex- 
cavated in 1909-1910, the huge palace of Apries, 
the Pharaoh Hophra of the Bible, one of the latest 
kings of Egypt. But the palace was built upon 
others, a veritable store-house, going down to the 
earliest times. 

Beyond Memphis is the village of Sakkara, near 
which is the re-opened tomb of the Sacred Bulls 
of Ptah, where the footprints of workmen who 
closed a vault thousands of years ago were found 

*Ilaameses and Pithom. Exodus 1:2. 



EGYPT THE DAWN 43 

in the sand inside— a thing so intimate, so fleeting 
as to be almost spiritual, preserved through cen- 
turies, to vanish, liberated, at a breath. One of 
the names of Ptah, was Ptah Sakkar-Osiris, the 
God of the Dead, literally the Opener; "who be- 
stows on the departed sun its power of rising again, 
and on departed souls a resurrection to eternal 
life on the other side of the grave. "* Today the 
little Arab village of Sakkara existing on a part of 
the ancient cemetery, unwittingly bears his name; 
and many tombs have been opened near by. Back 
of the Empire, back of the Middle Kingdom, it 
was the Ancient Kingdom which was buried here 
many centuries before Rameses, and was treasured 
up for us in this great Necropolis, which includes 
the Pyramids and extends for twenty miles on the 
western edge of the desert. Here is the first great 
effort in stone, the Step-Pyramid, a lasting memor- 
ial to that early architect who built it for King 
Zoser, "the great wise man Imhotep, " who could 
interpret the king's dream in reference to a seven 
years' famine and who was remembered as a god 
twenty-five hundred years afterward; here, too, 
is the tomb of Ptahhotep, the man who wrote the 
oldest known book, a book of precepts; here, the 
"eternal house" of Ti, the first record of a self- 
made man. Ti rose from the ranks and attained 
to the hand of a princess, and his children bore 
the rank of princes. His statue is in the museum 
of Cairo. 

The sands have drifted over these tombs of the 

*Ebers 



44 OUT OF EGYPT 

Ancient Kingdom, whose guest chambers were 
originally small houses built above the ground. 
The mummy-chambers underneath were bare, as 
were the shafts which led to them, and the latter 
were filled with rock to insure the safety of the 
body. We went down into the guest-chambers, 
whose walls are decorated with fine reliefs. It is 
the earth-life that is imaged here, the whole life of 
the period: hunting, ship -building, agriculture, 
the bringing of the produce of his fields to the 
master of the house. We find that then, as now, 
girls carried the burdens on their heads. 

One may linger long in this life of the Ancient 
Kingdom, to which one finds entrance only through 
a tomb. 



CHAPTER IV 

The River 

STILL under the power of the Past we re- 
turned to Cairo, and set sail up the river 
which leads into the Realm of the Ages, 
the way that kings and princesses once 
went. On that night of our departure the modern 
city, with its palaces and palms, slipped from our 
sight. And then at last Egypt was another dream 
fulfilled — at sunset, when dreams come true. We 
have seen how this river, the life of Egypt, is the 
color of the heaven from which it comes ; while the 
barren, yellow cliffs that edge the desert on both 
sides of the valley take on soft shades of rose and 
are reflected in the water; and the ravines are 
shadows of purple and blue which give depth and 
expression to the constant face of Nature. 

It is the setting we think we should imagine if 
we did not know of it, for that brilliant civiliza- 
tion, crude in some respects but full of color, which 
developed here. 

On the second day we came to Beni-Hassan. 
Donkeys carried us through palm groves and green 
fields and along the line where the Nile soil meets 
the sand. At the foot of steep cliffs we dismounted 

45 



46 OUT OF EGYPT 

to climb, far up and back, to the shelf where the 
precious dead had been laid away more than four 
thousand years ago; laid away with the greatest 
care at the bottom of pits sunk fifty feet deep which 
were closed and filled with stones. We under- 
stand what the Hebrews meant when they talked 
of "going down into the pit ! " The rock chambers 
above, which we entered, were the places where 
friends would meet to keep the memories. 

Before one of these tombs, that of Khnumhotep, 
are two pre-Doric columns, interesting architect- 
ural milestones of human progress. As the tombs 
admitted us to the Old Kingdom at Memphis, so 
here we gain entrance between these pillars to the 
Middle Kingdom. The strange frescoes on the 
walls of the guest chambers are a priceless record, 
opened to be read and learned, and now fading 
fast away. Each tomb is a book containing a life 
or the story of a campaign — one chapter in the 
history of Egypt. The scenes from the life of the 
deceased, — ^generally a prince or governor — and 
the inscriptions, supply many facts and details of 
existence and of historical events in Egypt, in the 
days of those kings under whom these princes 
ruled. Among the records are contracts for the 
keeping up of the tombs and the bringing of 
flowers on certain days. The most sacred place, 
the niche walled up at the end of the guest cham- 
ber, contained that which was cherished most, 
next to the body of the beloved one — his portrait 
statue. Might not his very spirit, as they beUeved, 



THE RIVER 47 

take possession of it? What can we, in these days 
of psychical research, deny? We feel a sacrilege 
in looking on those mutilated statues, whose pro- 
tecting wall is broken down, only less than one 
must feel in looking upon the actual Pharaohs. 

These tombs have also their connected family 
story. Khnumhotep was a partisan of Amenem- 
het I, the general who gained possession of the 
throne, and ushered in the Twelfth Dynasty, the 
classic dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. Khnum- 
hotep was count of the city of Menet-Kliufu, from 
whence had come Pharaoh Khufu, dynasties be- 
fore. This count succeeded also to the Oryx- 
/Uome, — a nome being one of the principal divisions 
of Egypt, and he, its ruler, a nomarch. He was 
the father of Ameni and of Nakht, who were by 
special favor of the son of Amenemhet, Sesostris I, 
appointed to inherit their father's "fiefs," Ameni 
as governor of the Oryx-nome, Nakht as count of 
Menet-Khufu. Beket, the sister of these two, 
married the vizier, who was also governor of the 
residence city. The son of Beket and the vizier, 
later Khnumhotep II, was appointed by the king 
to succeed his uncle Nakht as count of Menet- 
Khufu. He, realizing that his succession came 
through his mother, whose position as the daugh- 
ter of a nomarch was regarded as of much im- 
portance by the Pharaoh, himself sought in marri- 
age the heiress of the Jackal-nome. 

As we go down through the history of Egypt 
we shall find the importance of the mother and the 



48 OUT OF EGYPT 

daughter in the Pharaonic succession itself and 
even in the temple orders. 

One picture in the tomb of Khnumhotep lingers 
in our memories. It is a group of foreigners, 
evidently a Semitic people, bringing gifts, — and 
was at first popularly supposed to represent the 
entry of Joseph's brethren into Egypt. But it is 
now known to belong to a time before Abraham was. 
Nevertheless it signifies for us the entrance of that 
Semitic element which so strongly influenced the 
development of Egypt. This race was in power 
during the Hyksos period, when Israel's children 
are supposed to have come in. That wbuld ac- 
count for their welcome. In a deeper sense than 
appears on the surface, a later dynasty "knew not 
Joseph. " 

We were yet more impressed by an inscription 
within another tomb. Wonderful it was in Cairo 
to gaze upon the face of Pharaoh Rameses, asleep 
more than three thousand years. But more won- 
derful to hear the voice which speaks to us from 
the walls of Ameni's tomb, a voice silent more 
than four thousand years, but telling us now of a 
standard, not merely of right, but of goodness, in 
that far off time, which we today feel more im- 
portant to know than anything in that early civili- 
zation. 

"I have never made the daughter of a poor man 
to grieve; I have never defrauded the widow;" 
Ameni, the governor tells us, "I have never op- 
pressed the laborer, . , - there was never a 



THE RIVER 49 

person in want in my time, and no one went hungry 
during my rule, for if years of leanness came, I 
made them to plough up all the arable land in the 
nome — up to its very frontiers on the north and 
south. Thus I kept its people alive and obtained 
for them provisions. To the widow I gave the 
same amount as I gave to her who had a husband, 
and I made no distinction between the great and 
the little in all that I gave. And afterwards, when 
the Nile floods were high, and wheat and barley 
and all things were abundant, I made no addition 
to the amounts due from them. "* 

Because of this inscription, the dark portal of 
that dim tomb chamber on the desert clifi^ is the 
doorway for us to a knowledge of the spirit of 
Ameni's time. 

A straight, steep path from the terrace dropped 
us again to the plain and the present day. We 
rode back in the sunshine, trailing clouds of golden 
dust, until we reached the grateful cool of the 
palm grove, and the little white steamer awaiting 
us. 

Further up the Nile, our going through the lock 
of the great dam at Assiut, proved an interesting 
procedure. Thousands of years ago, the Egyp- 
tians regulated the flow of the river. That regu- 
lation was lost, and it is only recently, after many 
ages, that such a work has been accomphshed 
again. The lock is at the side of the great barrage 
which helps to control the water. Our steamer 
♦Budge 



50 OUT OF EGYPT 

slid over close to the bank where lay a line of sail- 
boats, filled with human freight. So near we came 
it seemed as if our projecting paddle-wheels must 
knock these people off. They got up good-natur- 
edly and shoved; and if our boat had moved off 
far, a dozen of them would have dropped in the 
Nile. Presently the water gates before us opened, 
and out poured a flood of boats, one grain-craft 
with its idle oar completely covered with birds. 
Then we moved, with many stops and much shout- 
ing from our native pilots — for the lock was barely 
wide enough to admit our paddle wheels, and the 
current against us was strong. No sooner were we 
at rest in the box than in followed the line of boats 
which had been waiting along the shore for an 
opening of the gates. Two little fishing-boats 
somehow slipped under our side, and lay close 
beneath our bow. Madly our pilot shouted, **Im- 
shi!" ("Go away!") to those behind, unmindful 
of the push they had given him. They too, un- 
mindful, crowded in, but the foremost moored to 
rings so far back in the lock, that the last boat, 
which was towed, could not be drawn inside the 
limit. The big spar tangled with another, the 
lower end was thrust over our lower deck, the 
smaller spar behind caught in the closing gates, 
Then there was excitement, for these people are 
like children. At last, by much moving through 
them all, the little spar was brought in, and the 
gates closed. The drawbridge swung over above 
them, and a crowd passed over it. Slowly the 



THE RIVER 51 

lock filled from beneath, the gates before us began 
to unclose, and the two little fishing-boats scudded 
out of danger, while we came lumbering after. 

It was such incidents as these which enlivened 
our trip; for a Nile journey is not only very beauti- 
ful — a poetic reverie full of the Past, — it is also 
very picturesque and full of humor in the Present; 
and these apparently conflicting elements cause a 
constant confusion in the mind. Our navigators 
were natives and clever ones, though we frequently 
ran aground. But what of that! — it was the will 
of Allah — and as we did not run at night, there 
was no danger. As for the captain or manager, 
he was a dapper little European, who used per- 
fumery, and had nothing to do with the running 
of the ship. He was there to control the natives 
and to look after the passengers ; and right well he 
did it, as our excursions have proved. He always 
rode out to meet us and counted us like sheep, 
that not one might be missing when the ship 
sailed. 

The second stop in our journey was at Assiut on 
the western bank. The coming of our boat to 
these towns and villages seemed to cause as much 
excitement as must the passing of the boats of 
former governors or princesses. The people rush- 
ed along the bank to be at the landing-stage — 
swarms of black cloaks against the dusty brown of 
hill and houses. We were as interested as they, 
while we watched from our upper deck the loading 
and unloading going on below, and the transactions 



52 OUT OF EGYPT 

between native vendors of bread and fruit and our 
native passengers. 

It is here at Assiut, among the rock-tombs 
similar to those of Beni-Hassan, that records have 
been sought of the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties. 
These rulers followed the Two Lost Dynasties, of 
which we have no records, since they began in an 
Age of Terror, that broke up the Old Kingdom. 
The feudal nobles of this place were prominent 
adherents of the Ninth and Tenth Pharaonic 
Houses. Here too, is a family story : the daughter 
of the nomarch widowed, her little son educated 
at the Pharaoh's court while she, succeeding her 
father, ruled for the boy till he came of age. 

The old Assiut is now the capital and largest 
town of Upper Egypt, and was for long the end of 
an important caravan route. We took a carriage 
instead of donkeys for the long drive to the town 
and through the bazaars. Part of the place is like 
any Southern city, with a long avenue of lebbek 
trees; part is built, like all the native villages, of 
bricks of Nile mud. Before the door of one of the 
huts sat a woman churning something in a skin, 
her naked brown baby beside her. Some of these 
dark children are quite beautiful, and full of mis- 
chief. They did not trouble us if treated kindly — 
a smile was worth as much as bakshish. Little 
girls ran after us, crying a peculiar call, a number 
of syllables in quick succession. Some of the 
children carried kids to show us, the youngest 
gleefully turning the animals' heads, which all 



THE RIVER 53 

baaed as they came around to position, exactly 
like the toys in our shops at home. 

Of course the people are dirty and their clothes 
are dirty — all of a piece. But somehow one does 
not mind — at a distance. They seem like well- 
worn dolls, whose clothes are not meant to come 
off. It was explained to us how the women skill- 
fully change their dresses over their heads while 
bathing in the river. The very religion of the 
Egyptians necessitates much washing of hands 
and feet, while the earth dirt is kind and itself dis- 
infects. They are lightly clothed and hve in the 
pure open air. The question of the flies and the 
babies' eyes is the most serious one. 

This condition is being slowly met by the medi- 
cal mission work. There is a large American mis- 
sion school and hospital at Assiut. The American 
and English mission work seems admirably organ- 
ized in Egypt, with the intention not to interfere, 
but to educate and heal, to train for cleanliness 
and morality. No vain attempt is made to dis- 
affect the women in their inferior position; but, 
among the higher class of men, English university 
graduates strive to create the desire for a better 
position for the native women. These college men 
prepare the way for the women missionaries' work 

Our ride through the bazaars was chiefly occu- 
pied in bargaining for an Assiut scarf. These 
charming shimmering pieces, known all over the 
West as Egyptian scarves, are made by the women 
here — supposedly for bridals, — and, with the red 



54 OUT OF EGYPT 

pottery, are the specialties of the town. Our car- 
riage, accompanied by a smiHng native policeman, 
was surrounded by merchants, and the bargaining 
began as we entered the narrow streets and ended 
with the flinging of the graceful thing into our 
laps, as we drove out. When we arrived at the 
side of the steamer, we found brisk bargaining 
going on there also, prices sinking rapidly as the 
moment of departure drew near; and purchases 
were made as long as money and goods could be 
thrown across the widening strip of water between 
the Egyptians and their amused and eager cus- 
tomers. In fact, the eagerness of the latter to get 
a bargain quite equalled that of the sellers them- 
selves. Turkish customers, negotiating with na- 
tives, assume an air of supreme indifference. 

As we advanced up the river our first temple 
took us again into the Past. It was the Temple of 
Dendera. We had read how the building was be- 
gun some hundreds of years before the Roman 
days in Egypt, was finished about the time of 
Cleopatra, and used through the Roman period; 
how it and its accompanying outside chapels had 
become, during the centuries since, gradually 
buried, until it was merely a hill upon the top of 
which modern Egyptians had built their houses; 
and how the authorities in charge of antiquities 
have cleared away the modern incumbents, and 
have dug out the temple, casting up the sand in a 
circle around it, a little distance from its walls and 
quite as high. 



THE RIVER 55 

Through fields of Egyptian clover we rode to the 
spot on donkeys, which strung themselves along 
the path, as if going to some old festival. 

Before us in the desert, beyond the living green 
plains, appeared a huge, uneven mound of earth. 
As we approached, it opened; and like something 
taking shape out of chaos, there rose in the centre, 
with the earth still clinging to its sides, the perfect 
temple — a building of wonderfully beautiful pro- 
portions, its sculptures seeming not broken, but 
scarcely finished yet. That was the impression — 
we had come to witness a resurrection ! 

Down into the solemn hall we passed, among 
the giant Hathor pillars, which marked this temple 
as belonging to a goddess, the personification of 
Nature; on into the dark ante-chambers and the 
corridors, marvelling at the massiveness of the 
building, marvelling equally how every inch of its 
many walls, inside and out, is covered with reliefs 
— among them the famous Cleopatra; on into 
the little court and temple in the side, where from 
the ceiling, the sun shining upon Hathor's head 
symbohzes the blessing of the temple; and into the 
holy of holies in the heart of the great building: — 
feeling more and more deeply the majesty and 
mystery of the Egyptian priesthood, and the sub- 
tlety of the Romans who could recognize the 
attributes of their own gods under Egyptian 
names. Into the secrets of the priests we entered, 
passing down to their subterranean treasure cham- 
ber in the thickness of the wall. It still contains 



56 OUT OF EGYPT 

the treasure of the temple, reHefs of finest work- 
manship. We found this place as difficult of 
access as it well could be. At the back of the 
farthest chamber of the temple a flight of stairs 
leads down to a wall in which, some distance 
above the level of the lowest step is an opening 
like an oven door. On the other side is a landing, 
from which, lighted by the candles of the guide, 
we made our way down more stairs at right angles 
to the first, leading to a long, narrow, airless pas- 
sage. It is a passage full of wonders, which flash- 
ed upon us and receded into darkness. Every 
hair of the sculptured heads, every feather of the 
birds, is perfect. But a sudden alarm seized us. 
A stout helmeted African-Englishman of our 
ship's company, had attempted to come down, 
and though divested of the helmet, which he had 
left in the charge of some young Turks, he stuck 
fast in the oven door. Still he would not miss the 
treasure and somehow dragged himself through, 
finally liberating us, whom he had penned below. 
We were glad to come up after that and to seek 
the light of day, so we went to the roof, a roof of 
temples and terraces, upon which, before the 
resurrection, had stood the Egyptian village. 
From its highest level we looked over the Nile 
valley and saw at our feet the small but exquisite 
birth chapel just emerging from the ground. We 
descended by the long East stair, dark almost all 
its length; yet as we held our candles to the wall, 
we could see that there was with us a great proces- 



THE RIVER 57 

sion; and beautiful were the forms and exquisitely 
moulded the faces of those silent companions. It 
was the procession for Dendera's festival — the 
festival of the New Year — which perpetually 
through all the ages, passes up the East stair and 
down the West. In modern buildings one may 
sometimes feel a presence, where one may not see. 
In these cold halls, one sees. 

We passed out of the gate of Dendera and rode 
away; and we looked back, trying to see it all 
again — only to find that the temple had vanished, 
apparently had returned into the earth. But we 
hold it in our minds, the perfect model, by which 
to understand and re-construct all the temples of 
that old religion. 

On we passed up the flowing river, so changing 
yet constant, so full of reflections — the same Nile 
which was the life of the ancient Egyptians. How 
beautiful it is, how mysterious! As we gazed 
upon its surface there was explained to us anew 
one of Egypt's secrets: — How the Egyptians, un- 
able to look upon the sun, which symbolized God 
for them under the name of Amon-Re, beheld him 
in his reflection in the water with his light spread 
into wings. Is not this the meaning of that Wing- 
ed Sun found above the first portal to all Egyptian 
temples? Were they not the Wings of the Morn- 
ing.? 

Over the river, across the reflection of this Wing- 
ed Sun of all time, float the cross-winged sail-boats 
of today. On shore, are friendly groups of leb- 



58 OUT OF EGYPT 

bek trees, and every here and there a terraced cut 
in the bank where groups of men raise the water in 
buckets from one level to the next. As we pro- 
ceed further south, this Shadouf, as it is called, is 
replaced by the Sakieh, or wheel. A wall of 
masonry closes the cut beneath the trees. The 
string of buckets depends from the wheel, and a 
patient ox is turning it, a cluster of villagers is 
always about it. 

The melancholy creak of the wheel sounds far, 
till it is thin and musical as an Aeolian harp. It 
is said that once a wheel was so perfectly put to- 
gether that it could not creak; but the owner was 
wroth with the maker and declared that the Sakieh 
was not perfect for him, since he could not tell 
whether the boy who kept the ox going was asleep 
or not. 

All this reveals the cause of Egypt's prosperity. 
The watering of the land is at the root of all her 
present agriculture, all her ancient civilization, 
and must still be laboriously done, in spite of 
canals and dams. 

From Cairo to Assouan we could see the modern 
life of the modern Egyptians forever drawn to the 
river like its own upper tributaries and carried on 
its bosom. The stream, cutting through and 
opening up the land, today causes green fields and 
forms a highroad for the natives; and at the same 
time a way for us to see and understand it all. 
Modern practical industries have been guided and 
stimulated by the English. Sometimes the real 



THE RIVER 59 

and active life of the Present threatens the destruc- 
tion of the ideal in the Past, as this ideal exists 
today in the form of monumental temples; threat- 
ens perhaps also the romantic ideal of Egypt in 
our own minds. It is true that in this Eastern- 
appearing country was the beginning of our West- 
ern civilization; yet it is somehow startling to us 
now to find the end with the beginning, and to see 
Occidental industry and bustle in this Orient- 
colored land. 

Truly, Man has travelled far in Egypt. 

However, this modern life of Egypt, which itself 
contains opposite elements, and also conflicts 
with the old, still receives a double beauty from 
the Orient and the Past. Near Helouan, we saw 
how stone is cut beside the mouths of the ancient 
quarries; and how it is carried on camels to boats 
beside the Nile. On our journey our studies were 
occasionally punctuated by the smoke-stacks of a 
sugar factory, which we took at first for an obe- 
lisk. Perhaps the reality jarred upon our sensibi- 
lities. Yet the sugar-cane is still carried under 
picturesque Egyptian sails, and thatches humble 
Egyptian homes. Egyptian cotton, also, has not 
only all the superior fineness of a product of the 
East, but is still associated with the romance of 
the camel and the caravan. 

The products of purely native industries like 
pottery-making, especially the Egyptian water- 
jars for Egyptian use — these float down the cur- 
rent and pass us. 



6o OUT OF EGYPT 

The river bears a living Present through the 
whole of history. The history is evident in the 
varied human types which throng about us at 
different stages of our journey. At Cairo there 
were numerous Turks, a few of whom may be 
found in official capacities up the Nile. There are 
not many Arabs. Some we saw as merchants in 
Cairo, others live their Bedouin life in the desert. 
Their name is erroneously and popularly applied 
to the true Egyptians by tourists, perhaps because 
of the Arabic language and the religion last im- 
posed upon these natives by their erstwhile con- 
querors, perhaps also because the name seems to 
cast over them the fascination which the East has 
always had for the West. After all, religion is 
before race. But the mass of the inhabitants of 
Egypt are Egyptians, descendants of that most 
ancient people. One may often see, in guide or 
rower, a startling resemblance to the bronze fea- 
tures of Seti I in the museum. While the Arabs 
always retain their graceful native costume, the 
better class of Egyptians, like all the Turks in 
Egypt, wear the European costume, and at the 
same time the fez, which is a protest, never lifted, 
of Oriental independence. Egyptian women, 

whom we visited in their harems in Helouan, 
imitate European dress with unfortunately poor 
success. With this change Egyptians seem to put 
off the finer aspects of their Eastern culture to 
make rather bad copies of the West. The lower 
class retain their Eastern costume; Syrian silk 



THE RIVER 61 

tunics and black cloaks for the men; black robes 
and veils and brass nose-ornaments for the women. 
On the desert, black robes over white tunics are 
frequently seen, floating out almost like wings, 
which add to that appearance of freedom with 
which their owners sweep along. But the poorest 
peasants, who form the mass of the population, 
wear a straight dark-blue garment. They seem 
to live, as do the beasts of the field, on the lentils 
or Egyptian clover, the plants which make the 
ribbon on each side of the Nile brighter than any 
green we know. Often we have observed these 
peasants in some barren village, sitting down be- 
side their cattle or the animals of burden which 
have carried the food, eating the same plant, leaf 
and stalk. Camels, laden with the clover look 
like hay- wagons or moving tree-tops. 

Of the other non-European inhabitants of Egypt, 
the "Copts," whose name was the old Greek word 
for Egyptians, are those natives, few in number, 
who have kept that form of the Christian religion 
which belonged to Egypt before the Mohammedan 
invasion. They are chiefly clerks or artisans. 
Theirs is the oldest Christian Church still in ex- 
istence, and is said to have been founded by St. 
Mark in Alexandria. Their desert monasteries, 
built some sixteen hundred years ago have but 
once in their history been entered by women, — 
two English scholars who, through a letter to the 
Patriarch, were recently permitted to search for 
valuable manuscripts, the pages of which they were 



62 OUT OF EGYPT 

allowed to photograph. These ladies found the 
books decaying, inches deep in dust, and the 
minds of the monks seemed to be in a similar con- 
dition. It is among the followers of this religion 
that the Western missionaries appear to accom- 
plish most. 

The Sais or runners whoni we saw chiefly in 
Cairo are furnished from a distinct tribe of South- 
ern Egyptians. 

Hindoos wander through the land as merchants 
and, true to the psychic quahty of their race, as 
fortune-tellers. Here and there are bronze-faced 
Nubian servants or vendors of trinkets and shells; 
but the Nubians are chiefly to be found, as are the 
proud Bicharines, beyond Luxor, at Assouan, the 
end of the journey at the First Cataract on the 
Nubian frontier. 

In the midst of the varied types, we ascend day 
by day toward the source of the river. 

Close by the water is always a border of palms; 
close by the shore is often a line of tall slanting 
spars. A foot path runs along the edge of the 
bank some distance above the ebbing river; and 
along it, out of the Past, come dark-robed flgures 
riding by on camels or on donkeys, or perhaps 
walking in companies of two or three, absorbed 
in conversation. Here and there one, solitary, is 
outlined against the sky. 

In the black costumes we saw Egypt in mourn- 
ing for her desecrated tombs. We came almost to 
fear some subtle vengeance of contagion, which a 



THE RIVER 6S 

romantic writer has suggested; and the keenest 
impression Kngering in our minds is that of the 
cry which accompanied us along the shore, whether 
for weal or woe — a shrill, thin, high-pitched, not 
unmusical cry, coming from a long distance, but 
filling the atmosphere. Sometimes it was for joy, 
as on the day of a festival, when we heard it most; 
sometimes for grief at funerals which crossed the 
river as of old. 

And still the black-robed women are drawing 
water — Egypt lives again — nay, Egypt has always 
lived. 

Going up the river means sailing deeper and 
deeper into the heart of a great revelation — where 
the mountains widen to hold Thebes; — it is going 
back more than three thousand years to the time 
of Moses and before, when the greatest temples 
the world has ever seen, were perfect. One may 
still read the writing on the walls. It is hearing 
the other side of a story we have known all our 
lives, — a side only recently revealed after all these 
thousands of years. 

We have journeyed up this stream to that day 
when the Euphrates was the river of the East, the 
Nile, the river of the West, and Israel rose between. 



CHAPTER V 

From the Love-Story of Egypt 

NOW come we to Luxor, the beautiful, 
the greenest place in the valley, — Luxor, 
whose tall palms are her living memor- 
ies of the glory of her great temple- 
garden. From the days of the Middle Kingdom 
down to now, the strangers of the world outside 
have journeyed here to Thebes. She was the 
"first monumental city of antiquity," where the 
largest temple of the world still lies upon the sand. 
Here was its garden, and here the scene of the first 
historic story of love. 

We passed up the stream between what had 
been the city of the living on the east bank, and 
the no less splendid city of the dead upon the west. 
The shore is strewn with the broken shells of the 
life which has gone, the fragments left here on the 
sands of time. Finest of all, most beautiful colon- 
nade remaining in Egypt, is the exquisite court of 
the Temple of Amenhotep III. It is not so large 
as the great Temple, but fairer and less ruined. 

The graceful columns, clusters of papyrus buds, 
were enclosed by their builders, but today shine 
down upon the river, and reflected in the water, 
bring back the spirit of the noble city to us. For 

64 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 65 

the sunset glow itself lends them its color, while the 
boats are passing over from the west, as they did 
in sunsets of old, and the beautiful pillars reveal to 
us the ancient glory of Thebes. 

There is no more Thebes, but ruins; and where 
the southern suburb lay is the modern Egyptian 
town of Luxor. There we landed. On the river 
are a row of curio and picture shops, while the 
rambling hotels are set far back in fascinating 
gardens. The air is softer, mellower at Luxor than 
anywhere in the valley. In the morning, shaking 
off the dragomen, and with no need for donkey- 
boys, since the temple is close at hand, we went 
down among those huge papyrus stems and buds, 
bathed in light, to dream through a golden day. 
The silent sunshine gilded the temple floor, the air 
was fragrant with incense of far-off flowers, birds 
sang among the columns. We entered into the 
shadows of the hypostyle hall and rested on the 
base of a pillar. And we remembered Queen Tia, 
and thought how the life of Amenhotep III, had 
expressed itself in beauty — as perhaps no other 
individual life in the history of the world, has ever 
been able to do. 

For Amenhotep III was king at the height of 
the golden age of the Empire, the Eighteenth 
Dynasty. x\hmose of Thebes, the first of his line, 
had gathered all Egypt to expel her Asiatic usur- 
pers, and with the army behind him and the 
government in his hand, had re-organized the 
state. It was a military state,* which, not con- 

*Breasted. 



66 OUT OF EGYPT 

tent with securing and developing itself at home, 
as it had been hitherto, reached out from victory 
over the alien rulers within itself, to the pursuit 
of conquest in alien lands. The line began as 
generals. Amenhotep I followed his father Ah- 
mose. Then came Thutmose I, and the historic 
family feud of the Thutmosids, with their in- 
tense passions raging about Hatshepsut, the Ehza- 
beth of Egyptian history. When she finally rose 
supreme, and during her long reign of peace and 
prosperity, her half-brother and husband, Thut- 
mose in, was bound to the priesthood of Amon; 
but after her death, his long restraint culminated 
in a series of campaigns so vigorous that he has 
been called the Napoleon of Egypt, the first world - 
conqueror. He extended the limits of the Empire 
as far as they ever were placed ; and laid tributary 
practically the whole of the known world. His 
son, Amenhotep H, and his grandson, Thutmose 
IV, — he who uncovered the Sphinx — were each 
compelled on their accession, to repeat some con- 
quests in Asia, but by the time of Amenhotep III, 
this was no longer necessary. Not only had the 
civil power been established by the military within 
the state, but to the utmost confines of the subject 
nations, whose rulers as vassals of the Egj^tian 
Pharaoh, were educated at the Egyptian court. 
In the comfort of Egypt's protection, all individual 
ambition had been lost. 

Safe roads made a fabulous commerce possible, 
in those fresh days of unexhausted resources. We 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 67 

read of trade like that of the Arabian Nights. 
The customs brought enormous revenues; capital 
and labor came from the captive nations. All 
things flowed to the Pharaoh and lifted him to the 
highest pinnacle. Was ever such wealth, such 
pride of power? — a pride secure enough to be 
calm and far above all harshness. He was mon- 
arch, not only of Egypt, but from Egypt, of the 
world. It was not organized society, but organ- 
ized control, that which the Pyramid expressed, 
lived out to its largest in the Empire. 

As Egypt had been the first nation, so now that 
other nations had come into being, was she the 
first world-power. Names that we know begin 
to appear — though it is not time for Moses for 
nearly two hundred years. The Court of Babylon 
acknowledged the authority of Amenhotep over 
Canaan. The world-conquests of Thutmose, the 
Napoleon, were followed by the world-politics of 
his great-grandson Amenhotep. The growth of 
the world had blossomed into peace. 

Egypt's kings had been brother-in-law, nephew, 
son-in-law or cousin to all the crowned heads of 
Asia. And not only were the Semitic nations 
subdued, but they, the conquered, as is always the 
case, had their effect upon the conquerors. The 
Semitic influence, strong since prehistoric days, 
was now moulded into Egypt, producing a new 
era. 

Amenhotep III, after the manner of all early 
rulers, is supposed to have contracted several alii- 



68 OUT OF EGYPT 

ances with the daughters of other kings; but he 
showed his supreme power as a Pharaoh, by his 
abihty to assert, in that position, his independence 
as a man. In his early manhood, perhaps while 
still crown prince, he made a morganatic marriage 
purely for love. He proved his greatness above 
all in that he could raise a lowly-born woman to the 
highest place in the world. This is the first love- 
story of history, and now, for the first time in 
history, is beauty fully revealed. 

But the story itself retains the charm of mys- 
tery. Despite all search and research, the details 
are still largely left to our imagination. 

Amenhotep issued scarabs to celebrate his mar- 
riage, as a ruler might issue medals today. Tia's 
name and his were carried even unto Greece. Her 
name is written with his upon all state documents 
and she now appears with Amenhotep on all public 
occasions, and is shown to the people beside him 
on the rich balcony of the palace. This exaltation 
of the queen was but the summit, at the height of 
Egypt's glory, of Egypt's reverence for woman- 
hood. 

Chateaux and temples had sprung up from end 
to end of Egypt. In Thebes the magnificent, 
risen for the second time as capital, and in unpre- 
cedented glory, the inhabitants walked in richest 
costumes of "purple and fine linen. " 

Amenhotep now became the great patron, fos- 
tering the germ of art for the future of the world. 

Alone among the temples upon the western 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 69 

bank of the river, he caused to be built the Palace 
of Queen Tia, a graceful structure of bricks and 
wood. It was adorned with brilliant colors. 
Egypt has always loved her white light broken 
and defined in the colors of dawn. Color belongs 
to the objective beginning, it belongs to the "Wings 
of the Morning;" but the color Egypt loved best 
was blue, — the highest color, the color of culture, 
heaven's own color, blue. 

Blue were the inner walls of the palace of Tia, 
blue-tiled with figures in gold-leaf upon them. 
Had ever a modern queen a more gorgeous or cost- 
ly abode? The painters put their best work in the 
palace; and there was not only color but sound, 
for the soft-toned harp had grown to large dimen- 
sions and was combined in an orchestra of four 
difl*erent kinds of instruments, including the Asia- 
tic lyre.* 

What the furniture of the palace must have 
been we can only glean in glimpses of such things 
which the Egyptians kept safely for the future in 
the tombs. Many have disappeared. Robbers 
long ago in Egyptian days, stole them away to 
perish. But it is only a short time since Mr. Davis, 
a man from the newest and farthest west of na- 
tions, working here at this ancient capital, came 
upon the tomb of Queen Tia's unknown parents. 
No Egyptologist can enter the opening to such a 

*Breasted. 

I believe the palace of Amenhotep III has been one of the three 
sites in Egypt excavated for the Metropolitan Musuem in New 
York, which now contains one of its beautiful ceilings. 



70 OUT OF EGYPT 

place without a feeling of awe, and at the same time 
of expectant exultation, since it is for him the way 
back into the ancient Empire. The robbers had 
been there before, but something had frightened 
them away, and they had dropped their booty in 
the tomb passage, where Mr. Davis found it: — a 
chariot of fine workmanship with an historic battle- 
relief ; a chair which, the Empress Eugenie declare- 
ed, was like those of the Empire in France; and 
back in the tomb-chamber a canopied bier, upon 
which lay Tia's parents side by side. 

In Cairo, and in the museums of the world where 
the spoils which the nations have taken from 
Egypt are hoarded, are fragments of tapestries 
equal to the best work of Europe, which once 
adorned the walls of such a palace; chairs and 
ottomans such as we use today; tables, draught- 
boards of ebony and ivory, with fine inlaying ;ves- 
sels of gold and silver, in heaviest and yet most 
chaste and exquisite workmanship; crystal, and 
glass, so beautifully colored that the world has 
never yet re-learned the art of making it. 

Before the palace of Tia, Amenhotep caused a 
lake to be excavated for her, the supposed em- 
bankments of which may still be seen. From the 
dawn of history this people had known how to 
conserve and manipulate the water-supply upon 
which their life as a people depended. Just as all 
public works, especially breaking ground for a 
canal, were always inaugurated by the king with 
great ceremony, so, when this excavation was 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 71 

ready, Amenhotep himself opened the gates to let 
in the water, on the day which celebrated for the 
twelfth time his coronation. He and the 
queen sailed out over the lake, and a gorgeous 
festival was made of the occasion.* 

So, near to its lake, is conjured up before our 
imagination the palace of Amenhotep's Queen Tia, 
a veritable fairy-palace, because existing only in 
our dream. But even a fragment of its floor- 
painting, may give a suggestion of all that must 
have been — a fragment the feet of this beloved, 
vanished queen have pressed. It represents three 
ducks among the lotus, which, with the papyrus, 
were the first national flowers. And it unfolds the 
fact that the artists who adorned this palace were 
skilled in catching the most fleeting, transitory 
moment which marks motion, and therefore re- 
veals life. 

The palace of Queen Tia is gone, it belonged to 
the fleeting, earth-life phase of the individual, — 
brilliant, beautiful and frail. The temples were 
permanent, for the everlasting god and the memor- 
ial of the king, such as men seek to make their 
temples today. 

It was the temple which concentrated and ex- 
pressed all the beauty of the age at Amenhotep's 
will. The work of Egypt was building — we can- 
not wonder at the development of the task-master. 
The wise men of Egypt were her architects — it is 
they who above all were the counsellors of her 

*Brea8ted 



72 OUT OF EGYPT 

kings, they, whose writings were preserved as 
proverbs; they, of whom several, after a niillenium 
had passed since they slept, were worshipped as 
gods in their country. So did it happen a thous- 
and years later to the chief architect of Amenho- 
tep III, who bore the king's own name and wrought 
the king's wish in stone. 

A great era of building had set in and it seems 
as if Amenhotep, out of the fullness of joy in his 
own heart, had said to his architects and artists: 

"You are given men, material, and the conven- 
tional forms, what new life will you create?" 

And they did create two new things for the 
future of the world.* One was that small but 
exquisite cella temple, in which the holy of holies 
is set within a colonnade, the columns guarding it 
on all sides. Do we not discover in this a pre- 
natal influence upon Greece.^ 

The other development grew out of the old 
arrangement, the tabernacle form, and took shape 
in this Temple of Luxor, where we have been all 
the morning. It is found not only in the temples 
which followed this in Egypt — but many a time 
when we have looked upon a cathedral of Europe 
we have unknowingly beheld something made 
possible by that which originated here. 

Temples were rising at the bidding of Amenhotep 
in Egypt, Nubia and Sinai. The state temple of 
Amon, now Karnak, in Thebes, which had been 

*The following description of the temples is based upon the account 
of the temple development in Breasted's "History of Egypt. 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT tS 

added to successively by Amenhotep's ancestors, 
was enlarged and fabulously enriched by him; a 
new pylon added, stelae made of lapis lazuli, floors 
and walls encrusted with silver and gold and pre- 
cious stones — the whole a gorgeous mass of color, 
its shining obelisks pointing to the sky. That 
temple, lifeless today, with its dark mysteries, 
must then have been a reservoir of light, its glit- 
tering walls and towers giving forth the radiance 
of the Sun -god. And before it, in the radiance, 
stood the calm colossal figure of the king, looking 
across the river, where lay the palace of his Heart's 
Desire. 

At Karnak too, Amenhotep built the temple 
to Mut, the mother-goddess, his sacred ideal of 
motherhood, in whose character the queen ap- 
pears; and there he dug her sacred lake, as he had 
the pleasure lake for Tia. As the temple of Anion 
at Karnak was built to a glorified idea of manhood, 
which Amenhotep represented in himself; so the 
Temple of Mut was built to the idea of woman- 
hood, whose crown queen Tia wore. Having con- 
nected the sanctuaries of Amon and Mut, Amen- 
hotep made a wondrous avenue of sphinxes, which 
extends for a mile and a half to Luxor, uniting the 
temple he was building there in one harmonious 
scheme with Karnak. Between the two he laid 
out a vast garden. 

For at Luxor, the Theban suburb, Amenhotep 
had found a small temple to the state-god Amon. 
He pulled it down. The Egyptians themselves 



74 OUT OF EGYPT 

often pulled down to rebuild. Then his architects 
constructed this great temple, not, like the Kar- 
nak building, added to and enlarged about a small 
central beginning, but on one simple, perfect plan. 
Behind this hypostyle where we have rested is the 
holy of holies. Its carvings have since been plas- 
tered over, for it has been used as a Coptic Church. 
An altar, perhaps Roman, stands before it in the 
hypostyle itself. The chambers around the sanc- 
tuary have become so ruined as to lose their clois- 
tered look, while their mystery is strangely en- 
hanced by their appearance as a maze. One ob- 
tains some idea of the intricate ground-plan. A 
small side-chamber, which opens toward the outer 
corridor, and faces the eastern girdle-wall still 
standing, is the birth chapel on the walls of which 
is the birth-story of Amenhotep, the son of Amon, 
whose name means "Amon rests." 

Before the hypostyle hall, the majestic court grew 
into being, with its double colonnade of papyrus- 
bud columns. It completed the temple except for 
a pylon before it. Then Amenhotep or his archi- 
tect dreamed a dream, which men still embody in 
the architecture of today. Before the court it was 
planned to erect a second hypostyle hall, on an 
altogether grander scale than had ever been at- 
tempted before. It was probably intended to 
place before this hall another court, where the 
somewhat rude forecourt of Rameses II stands 
today. The hall was to have a central aisle or 
nave between two rows of seven giant columns 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 75 

with flower capitals. The rows of columns on 
each side of these would be much lower, and the 
hall would be lighted by openings in the story of 
wall which joined the lower and higher roof. Thus 
did the basilica and the cathedral form originate! 

Amenhotep passed away before more than the 
twice seven great columns were standing. His 
son, for reasons we shall come to understand, was 
obliged to abandon the grand hall just taking 
shape. The drums of the other columns were later 
used to enclose the lonely nave. Rameses II 
patched it out with his huge forecourt and pylon, 
his obelisks and colossal statues. 

A detail, small but significant, lingers in our 
minds. In the Temple of Luxor, through the 
pylon of Rameses II, where a corner of his fore- 
court is unexcavated, a little white mosque chngs 
like a bird's nest among the capitals of the giant 
pillars. In the earth beneath it, rests the body of 
a Mohammedan saint, and to excavate would be 
to disinter. Hence the columns are hidden and — 
preserved. 

In another corner of this court, behind the figure 
of Rameses, is a treasure picture, a relief which is 
for us a restoration of the temple. A festival pro- 
cession of the priests with Rameses' sons approach- 
es the great pylon, before which are the coUossi 
of the king, with the two obehsks — one of which 
is now in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Flags 
are flying from the tall poles before the pylon, and 
reminded us somehow of the king's birthday be- 
fore St. Mark's. 



76 OUT OF EGYPT 

But the court of Amenhotep III remains alone 
to us for beauty and the giant nave beyond, alone 
for a great thought. The idea was carried out to 
its perfection by Seti I, and Rameses II, in the hy- 
postyle at Karnak, the largest hall in the world. 
But the unfinished hall of Luxor, eloquent of many 
things in its broken incompleteness, gave the sug- 
gestion for the later sacred architecture. 

Amenhotep reared one more glorious building, 
his mortuary temple, which, like those of his 
fathers, rose on the western plain. In it was ex- 
pressed the summit of his prosperity; and from all 
that we can learn of it, it was probably the most 
exquisite work of art that Egypt ever saw. We 
can dream of the sculptures which adorned it, of 
the avenue of jackals which led up to the two 
collosi before it. The thirty foot high stela which 
marked the "Station of the King, " where he stood 
to perform the ritual, was incased in precious metal 
and studded with jewels. Another, of lapis lazuli, 
recorded all that Amenhotep, the king, had done 
for his father Amon. How could the king fear 
dying, to enter into such immortal glory, and be 
worshipped as a god ! 

But this temple was too perfect to escape de- 
struction, that its material might be used by a later 
ruler, who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, — too 
perfect to have lasted, lest it discourage the future. 
Only a trace remains; Luxor is still the best we 
know in Egypt. 

The great stela of the mortuary temple lies 



FROM LOVESTORY OF EGYPT 77 

broken and denuded on the western plain. Out of 
nature, back to nature, have passed the beautiful 
forms. The avenue of jackals, which led up to the 
temple, is a winding path through the fields to the 
colossi. They alone, after repeated damages from 
which they have been recovered, still hold them- 
selves above the encroachments of Time. Strange- 
ly enough, one of these inarticulate stone statues 
found a voice to speak itself in music. Whether 
a crack filled with dew, vibrated when the sun's 
rays touched it, can only be surmised; but for 
centuries the broken figure, turned as it is toward 
the East, greeted the dawn with music. Distin- 
guished visitors travelled from Greece to hear it 
and left their names upon the base. The voice 
ceased with the statue's restoration. 

The faces of these figures have smoothed them- 
selves out to an inscrutable expression, while the 
wisdom of the centuries was being gathered. But 
there exist rare portraits of this king. The work 
of the sculptors in the temples has lived longer 
than that of the painters in the palaces. Even 
that color, with which the statues and reliefs were 
clothed has dropped away from them. But we 
can see how the masters of the plastic art succeeded 
not only in catching a representative moment in a 
general type of life, but in seizing and holding as 
never before, the idea in an individual, the mood 
of a man. 

In the British Museum, far away in London, is 
a face of this first lover in history, the royal Amen- 



78 OUT OF EGYPT 

hotep, which shows the power of the sculptors of 
his day to catch the soul of the man. DeQuincy 
said of it that it unites "the expressions of ineffable 
benignity with infinite endurance. " 

The king was gathered to his fathers in the rough 
mountain valley. Later Queen Tia, the Beloved, 
died and was buried. 

During a recent winter, Prof. Petrie, excavating 
in the remote desert of Sinai, found there in a 
temple a portrait head of Tia. Hitherto her face 
had only been imagined from a few unsatisfactory 
rehefs, which were necessarily profiles; and the 
identity of which was not certain. This little 
head belonged to a statuette, the whole of which 
had been no more than one foot high. The head 
was all that remained. Yet Prof. Petrie consider- 
ed this one treasure, alone worth the whole year's 
work. It seems to prove that another face, carved 
in marble, which he calls "the supreme queen's 
head " was also a portrait of this queen who inspired 
such devotion in the heart of the most glorious 
king of Egypt. The small head lately found is, 
Petrie tells us, evidently taken from life with 
great freedom and great dehcacy, especially about 
and under the eyes. Describing it he speaks of 
the "haughty dignity" of the face, blended with 
"fascinating directness and personal appeal;" of 
the lips drawn down with disdain yet free from 
malice, lips full yet delicate. 

The queen's crown rests upon the haughty little 
head. At the time of the discover}^ it furnished 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 79 

the best description we had of such a head-dress, 
which had been known only from drawings of its 
folded vulture wings.* The real gold crown was 
still hidden away with the queen. This sculptured 
one appeared to represent gold open-work, with 
the queen's name above the brow between the two 
serpents signifying power, and the two wings of 
protection. 

But a greater discovery has since been made. 
Mr. Theo. M. Davis has found the tomb of the 
queen herself. It had been unmolested except by 
a visit from the priestly enemies of her noble son. 
They erased his name wherever found, without 
carrying away the gold or harming the queen's 
body, except to turn it over. The tomb is re- 
markable for several things, including this priestly 
visit; for its immunity from robbery, and for its 
treasures, consequently intact. Among these is 
the little figure of a water-girl, done with such 
freedom, that if discovered anywhere else it would 
be imputed to Greece rather than to conventional 
Egypt. But the time of Tia's son, during which 
she was interred, was the one reign when Egyptian 
art broke all the bonds of tradition. The queen's 
gold crown was found with her, the first crown of 
a queen to be discovered. It is the sacred head- 
dress, indicating that the god protects the royal 
person as the vulture protects her young. The 
vulture is the emblem of motherhood and is sacred 
to Mut, the Great Mother. Hence the mother- 

*Such Its Cleopatra's at Dendera. 



80 OUT OF EGYPT 

queens, protected and protecting, wore vulture 
head-dresses. 

The queen's body seemed perfect and yet es- 
caped from her discoverers. There is that in 
Egypt which is not tangible, which cannot be 
transported. It was there in the steps of the work- 
men at Sakkara — the actual footprints of a vanish- 
ed life — just as it passed. There are many things 
one sees, many things one does not see — things 
which are glimpsed or guessed. Through this 
dark rock chamber, a tiny stream of water had 
found its way while the queen had slept for thirty- 
five hundred years; and when the light was let in 
and they touched her, she vanished — there was 
only a handful of dust. So she eluded them, so 
she escaped the gaze of irreverent tourists. 

Amenhotep III and Queen Tia are gone, but 
the importance of their love marriage was not fully 
revealed until after the old king's death, in their 
son. 

In the last days of Amenhotep's reign, a subtle 
change had taken place in the condition of the 
Empire, scarcely seen and not understood by him. 
Luxury had overbalanced itself in the lives of the 
people, with their elaborate homes and costumes, 
— their wigs, their pointed sandals, all their affecta- 
tions — the extreme of their civilization. 

On the other hand while the kings of Egypt had 
represented divinity to the nation, the people knew 
Amenhotep as a man. He was a mighty hunter. 
With no more enemies to conquer, there was no 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 81 

conquest left but of the wild bulls in the marshes, 
the lions in the hills. Amenhotep several times 
celebrated his accomplishments in this direction 
by an issue of scarabs. But no king before him 
had become thus familiar to his people. He made 
himself less than a god in his anxiety to record his 
human achievements. His divinity is expressed 
on the human side — especially in his marriage and 
in his relation with foreign powers. He is no more 
a god, ruling over a valley which is the world and 
holding it for the god whom he succeeds; but a 
king who, ruling over other rulers, is a human 
brother to them. Yet his extended authority 
also suggests the larger idea of a universal god.. 
Church and state are one. The state is the expres- 
sion of its god's authority. 

In the days of Amenhotep, the priesthoods were 
seeking, each in its own local worship, the god 
who was to be worthy the Empire and to rule the 
world. Imperialism was about to express itself in 
thought — and dissolve. This was the dawn of 
philosophy. In the meantime the Empire was 
already breaking on its edges. And Amenhotep 
was lulled to sleep in his dream of beauty. 

Amenhotep IV, the son of the first historic love- 
marriage, the marriage of Amenhotep III and 
Queen Tia, is the first ideahst, the first to stand 
out alone in matters of the deepest consciousness, 
the first to claim a religious revelation — Breasted 
calls him the first individual in history. 

Though he gained his conception through Re, 



82 OUT OF EGYPT 

Amenhotep IV saw that none of the old gods 
would satisfy it. They were limited by defining 
personalities. His idea was even more abstract 
than the monotheisms which followed it. *' Before 
science was, he had thought out an entirely scienti- 
fic system."* The sun's disk or "aton" repre- 
sented the heat in all life. Thus Amenhotep IV 
obtained the idea of one source and one power, as 
it is manifested through the sun. 

The Aton was never figured with any form of 
man or beast — ^from the sun's disk proceeded in- 
numerable rays ending in hands which brought life 
and power to all things on the earth. As opposed 
to the figures of the gods, it was a symbol which 
spoke a universal word, not to be misunderstood, 
even by alien peoples. The gods had needed 
interpreters. Dauntless in his convictions against 
the world upon which he stood, the young king 
was always deeply influenced by his mother, and 
by his probably Semitic wife who is always por- 
trayed with him. He built a temple to his god in 
the garden between Karnak and Luxor. But his 
new worship quickly came into conflict with the 
established priesthoods, especially with the priest- 
hood of Amon-Re, the former state-god, whom he 
had deposed. So bitter and violent was this con- 
flict that when it was over, neither priesthood nor 
king was left in Thebes. The halls of Karnak and 
Luxor were deserted, the priests scattered, the very 
name of Amon was chiseled out wherever it occur- 

♦Petrie 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 83 

red, though that place were in the name of the 
king's father, on his father's sculptured form. 
And the king's own name was changed. He is no 
longer Amenhotep IV, but emerges from the 
tempest, as Ikhnaton, the individual who is the 
"Glory of the Aton." 

Life must always be expressing itself in form, 
but where the form crystallizes to prevent growth, 
life must always break through or transform it. 
This son of Amenhotep III, worthily developing on 
a higher plane, the ideal nature which in his father 
found expression in the beauty of these Theban 
halls, was obliged by that very nature to overthrow 
and desert these scarce finished halls of his father 
and even his father's name. His spirit had leaped 
into being, destroying the forms which held it. 
But overcome by the bitterness of the struggle, he 
left Thebes for his new capital Akhetaton, where 
is now the Egyptian Tell-el-Amarna, which we 
passed further down the river. 

Here he held his court and established the wor- 
ship of the Aton. Thus the marriage of Amenho- 
tep III, and Tia, proved portentous; for their son 
Ikhnaton, dwelling in the ideal as more real and 
lasting than the material, became the heretic king 
of Egyptian history, the reformer, worshipping 
the "one God of Light in the form of the Sun- 
disk." 

There were no figures of gods in the temples of 
Ikhnaton's new capital at Akhetaton — nothing but 
the Sun. In Egypt the figures of Amon were 



84 OUT OF EGYPT 

destroyed; and Egyptian art, though only for a 
reign, was set free from the conventional symbols. 

But the people were not developed to this high 
conception, the heart of the country was torn, the 
Empire fell apart, and a few reigns later the 
dynasty itself passed out. 

It was the natural course of events. 

While Ikhnaton was establishing the new religion 
and working out the thought of the one source of 
life, there came to him letters from his vassals in 
Asia begging him for aid. There were disaffec- 
tions, invasions. A new generation had forgotten 
the army of Egypt and the might of Egypt's king. 
But either the king did not understand, or he 
understood too well; for the Hittite power had 
arisen in the north and waxed treacherous and 
strong. 

An army was needed to preserve the Empire 
form; but Ikhnaton did not lead his army into 
Asia. Perhaps it was not so much that the pro- 
vinces were of less value to him in their essential 
life, than was his ideal, in which all life was one; 
but that the holding of them by Egjqjt was less 
vital to him. Ikhnaton's course of inaction must 
have seemed utterly impractical from any con- 
temporary material point of view, as it does to 
some historians today; impractical for the good of 
Egypt and the arbitrary organization of the Em- 
pire. 

The height and breadth of an abstract concep- 
tion had been reached by Ikhnaton alone. The 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 85 

national feeling and the national god still meant 
to Egypt the uniting of a certain number of men 
against others. It was true of them as of other 
nations that the form of god they worshipped 
expressed their genius; were they not symbolically 
right in believing that it was their god who tri- 
umphed or was conquered? 

When the Empire had become a world power, 
suggesting and revealing a universal god, Ikhna- 
ton had seen that this god must be in all — therefore 
he, the king, could no longer fight to hold the 
Empire. His god was not, like the idea of Amon, 
a "God of battles," but the god whose life was in 
all. The bravery of his race turned not in him to 
conquest of a foreign people, but to facing his own 
with his ideal. 

Ikhnaton and his immediate successors lost the 
Empire in Asia, which was never entirely regained; 
but in reading history we must perceive each fact, 
not with regard to an individual or a nation, but 
with regard to its place in the whole development 
of mankind. Something greater than the individ- 
ual, greater than the good of any one country, was 
moving through Egypt. 

Life was probably not destroyed in the provinces, 
any more than the Egyptian army would have 
destroyed it. They had to learn to struggle for 
themselves and some developed a growth of their 
own. The form of a state religion had for once 
been broken through, the form of a state now fell 
apart and permitted other lands to rise. 



86 OUT OF EGYPT 

In Ikhnaton was the consummation, the flaming 
up of the rehgious Hfe of Egypt. 

When the state reKgion of Amon was restored 
with the new dynasty, it was only as a form, from 
which the spiritual life was gone, the religious form, 
which instead of being expressed in the state, had 
begun to absorb the state, until the state came to 
assume the form. 

Neither was the city of Thebes ever the same 
after Ikhnaton, not even in the days of that great 
builder, Rameses II. 

Akhetaton has vanished. Tell-el-Amarna is 
today the desert place of the Abstraction. The 
city which once expressed this thought and lay 
there upon the desert, has passed, a flower as 
spiritual as the dew-flower, whose life is drawn up 
in the glare of day. There only remain the collec- 
tion of letters, the most remarkable, because the 
earliest collection of letters in the world. They 
tell the story from without. 

Not in any weakness of Amenhotep, as Breasted 
thinks it was — , or of his son, but in the evanescent 
growing quality of conditions, was the change that 
came after Amenhotep 's reign. His was the per- 
fect flowering, that was all. Out of it arose the 
idealism of Iklmaton, and the breaking of the 
bonds of the old form, even to the limits of the 
Empire organization — a consequence neither father 
nor son could themselves have fully foreseen. 

Yet thus was the way prepared for Israel. 

More imposing than the colossal statues of 



FROM LOVE-STORY OF EGYPT 87 

Amenhotep III, or Rameses II, is the spiritual 
figure of the son of Amenhotep III and the Queen 
Tia, Ikhnaton, the ideahst, the "Glory of the 
Light." 



CHAPTER VI 

Before the Temple 

KARNAK, Temple of Temples, "Nation- 
al Sanctuary," "Throne of the World," 
lying so vast, so broken, so open to the 
sunlight, where thou hast yielded up 
the secret of Egypt and her history, — how may 
one tell of thee! 

When the evening and the morning were the 
second day, we went by the old way to Karnak. 
It is Amenhotep's avenue of sphinxes that leads 
thence from the Luxor temple. At first the small 
bazaars of the native Egyptian village cling about 
the road, but it leads off into the palms where was 
the ancient garden and where, here and there, 
hamlets of mud huts seek to hide themselves. All 
the way, the broken sphinxes, one by one take up 
and carry on the story of the grand processions 
that passed between the temples — especially at 
Amon's Feast of Opet, which for importance was 
as the Hebrew Passover at Jerusalem, or the 
Christian Easter of today at Rome. More than 
once, and once on this very road, great changes of 
government were accomplished at this festival. 

For a mile and a half we rode northward until 
we drew near to the home of the state religion of 

88 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 89 

Egypt. Passing a ruined group of buildings to the 
east — the Temple of Mut, which Amenhotep 
reared to the goddess of the Theban triad, — we 
reach a meeting of the ways. An avenue of 
sphinxes leads at right angles eastward to the 
northern entrance of the Mother-goddess' temple, 
from whence another avenue, parallel with our 
own, stretches to the first of many gateways ap- 
proaching the side of the Temple of Amon. We 
keep on our way, and just ahead, there stands one 
of the most beautiful doors in all Egypt, a late 
portal to the Temple of Khonsu, the son of Amon 
and Mut. We dismount and enter, that we may 
climb the pylon for our first survey of Karnak, the 
Great. 

Beyond the court at our feet we catch a glimpse 
of dark and empty halls, where now the sun lies 
flecked upon the floor. This little Temple of 
Khonsu has its own interest, its contribution to the 
dramatic story of the state, but we are not ready 
for that now. From the solemn and mysterious 
chambers below us we lift our eyes to look across 
the billowy sands. What mighty wreck, like a 
great ship, lies there.? More than a thousand feet 
in length we trace its shape. The pylons at the 
front are high, the great hall with its broken 
windows, rises in the midst, but the low sides at 
either end of the whole structure are all but washed 
over by the sand. In the submergence the height 
of the hall itself is not realized from without. The 
waves are up to the top of Rameses Ill's chapel. 



90 OUT OF EGYPT 

and in places surge over the walls. In the first 
space, a single rounded column holds itself erect, 
and near the middle of the length are several shafts 
still standing — the others have gone over. 

It was in Karnak that the ship of state went 
down. 

For in Karnak the whole state was gathered up. 

Since the first historic day, when Menes, the 
first king of a united Egypt, appears upon earth's 
stage as *'Horus," the successor of the god who 
ruled the land — from that day even unto this, the 
unity of church and state has been an accomphshed 
fact. It has sprung from a fundamental percep- 
tion, over which has developed a great division. 
For men felt truly in the beginning that power was 
divine, and that the laws of Man should express 
the Sacred Will. But they limited God by forms, 
each man after his kind; and with that sense of 
unity which also came by intuition, each has at- 
tempted to extend his finite idea of God and God's 
Will over the rest of mankind. Hence have arisen 
the bitterest struggles of history, and the separa- 
tions of church and state. Yet, fundamentally, they 
cannot be separated. The latest and freest of 
nations had its beginnings partly for worship — a 
free worship. 

In early Egyptian days, among many others, 
there was Ptah, the Builder in Memphis; Re in 
Heliopolis; Amon in Thebes. When the land was 
united all these forms existed together. The 
Egyptians built them temples of stone, and made 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 91 

them rituals of worship. Through those centuries 
of the longest history any people have ever known, 
beginning with the beginning, they added to the 
temples and elaborated the rituals — ^till every figure 
on the temple walls was prescribed in all its pro- 
portions, which had their mystical significance. 

The chief business of Egypt was building. The 
first genius was wrought into stone. For men 
dreamed how long their work would have to last. 
They must make the form to contain the god 
that it might also suggest him. Egypt became 
the land of temples. Strangely like and yet un- 
like, the building of the national temple at Thebes, 
is the building of the national temple at Jerusalem. 
Strangely like the same story also, reads the record 
of the offerings to the Christian Church of St. 
Mark. Greece also had her Parthenon. It is 
only in our own day that the making of great 
public buildings has superseded to some extent 
the building of the temple which has been the 
chief business of all ages. 

In time, in Egypt, the form became all. The 
glory of the gods destroyed the land. The wealth, 
constantly drawn in large endowments from the 
state, overtopped the economic balance, the priest- 
ly power dethroned the king. 

We descend to the darkened mysteries of this 
little temple of Khonsu to think over the story, 
before going on to Karnak. 

In the Egyptian Middle Ages the rise of a The- 
ban family to power had made Thebes the capital. 



92 OUT OF EGYPT 

With the development of the Empire, Amon, the 
god of Thebes, became the state god — combined 
with Re of HeHopoHs as Amon-Re. The Egyptian 
official worship was always Sun-worship, whether 
of Amon, Re, or Aton. The temples were the 
shadows of the Sun. 

The Temple of Amon at Karnak became the 
national temple of the state religion, added to by 
king after king of the Empire. These kings wrote 
their conquests on its outer walls, their offerings 
within. It is the book of their history. Karnak, 
more than anything else, represents what Egypt 
stood for — the building of the temple. 

From the time of Thutmose III, it became the 
chief glory of each king to outdo his predecessors 
in gifts to the state god. As their wealth increas- 
ed, the power of the priests by which they could 
control the king increased, and the more they 
could command. It was all out of proportion, out 
of harmony, we can see now that the break was 
sure to come. But how many individuals in any 
age can understand the tendencies which are work- 
ing through themselves.'^ An economic evil once 
set going, interacts with conditions and grows 
constantly greater until it destroys itself. Each 
king for his own glory and later for the preserva- 
tion of his position, added to the power of the 
priests. And the priesthood of Amon received 
many times more than all the rest. It therefore 
gained control of the others. 

Only once while the temple was building and 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 93 

while the priests were fettering the kings, — only 
once, as we have seen, was the form broken through 
by the life within. That was the first religious 
revolution in history. And after that there was no 
more life in the form. The story of the state 
temple is a study in organization. 

In the Eighteenth Dynasty the priesthoods of 
Egypt, each with its orders of rank, had become 
united, with the High Priest of Amon as their 
head. He was chief ecclesiastic, head of an hier- 
archy whose control reached every corner of the 
land. Thebes, the state capital, became the 
religious capital. In the Theban Temple the 
records of all the priesthoods were kept. 

In the Nineteenth Dynasty the High Priest of 
Amon had succeeded in making his office hereditary. 
The Pharaoh was still, as always in theory, the 
head of the worship of Egypt for all the people. 
When the days of conquest were over, the chief 
use of the Pharaoh in the hands of the priests, was 
to minister to the Temple. The Temple had laid 
hold of the temporal power. 

The gold country of Nubia was given to the 
state god in the Nineteenth Dynasty. At first 
the Viceroy of Nubia was Governor of the Gold 
Country of Amon. By the latter part of the 
Twentieth Dynasty the High Priest of Anion was 
Viceroy of Nubia. 

It is in the days after the glory of the Empire 
that we trace the history, not of religious feeling, 
but of the binding and destroying influence of con- 
ventional forms. 



94 OUT OF EGYPT 

Feast days were added to the already elaborate 
religious calendar, and while these days called for 
more revenue, as holidays they depleted labor, 
the source of revenue. 

The people wrought in heaviness to support the 
burden; Rameses III, of the Twentieth Dynasty, 
was forced to depend upon mercenary troops and 
his treasury went bare. It was a state, bankrupted 
by its religious order. The poor man's god un- 
fortunately lived in a palace. 

Yet the priests did a good work. Theirs were 
the only schools and universities. They were 
the conservers of learning, the preservers of the 
old language. 

The hereditary head of the priesthood of Egypt, 
entrenched in the eternal palace of the god, with 
boundless wealth at his command, watched the 
last struggle of the kingship. The princely priest, 
Amenhotep, married Isis, the daughter of Rameses 
VI. A Httle older than the last three brothers of 
that king, this Amenhotep became their tutor. 

One more concession he compelled from Rameses 
IX, the last of all. The Temple under the heredi- 
tary priesthood might collect its own revenues. It 
thus became a separate state. 

The time was ready. Amenhotep, the High 
Priest, had a son, Hrihor, who was also the son of 
the daughter of Rameses VI, and who became 
High Priest. And then, the change was effected 
— quite naturally, it seems, — when one puts to- 
gether the findings of several Egyptologists. The 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 95 

last of the family of Rameses slips somehow into 
desuetude, and the priest, with all proper forms 
and ceremonies, stands in his place. The carvings 
in this temple of Khonsu tell the story without 
words. And the records of the time reveal, with 
the ascent of Hrihor, the absolute sway of magical 
forms. It was a state established on and ruled by 
the constant violation of law, in perversion of the 
truth. 

But Hrihor was unable to extend his temporal 
control over all Egypt. The increasing power of 
his father and himself, had long meant the increas- 
ing weakness and the final dissolution of the state. 
A new kingship had arisen in the north out of that 
weakness, to block his way; and to cut off Thebes, 
the religious capital, from the circulation of the 
world. 

As High Priest of Anion, Hrihor had still a 
measure of power over all Egypt. Nesubenebded, 
the Delta King, passed the High Priest's envoy 
on to Syria for cedar of Lebanon for Amon's sacred 
barge, when he would not have done the same at 
the behest of the Pharaoh Rameses.* 

Hrihor, as king, was unable to control Nesu- 
benebded. From this time on the kingdom was 
broken, Thebes remaining an ecclesiastical state 
independent and untaxed. Seldom able to control 
the country, refusing to be controlled, it usually 
succeeded in breaking the country. By an old 
method, the difficulty was solved for the moment. 

*See the story of the diplomatic messenger in Breasted's History 
of Egypt. 



96 OUT OF EGYPT 

A grandson of Hrihor, Paynozim at Thebes, mar- 
ried a grand-daughter of Nesubenebded. It is 
recorded how she came south for her marriage. 
Poor, sweet Maat-ka-ra, of the beautiful portrait 
and the elaborate coffin — one of the finest dis- 
covered in Thebes, — proving the love and regret 
that went with her down into the tomb. She died, 
still young and fair, in childbirth, — and lies now 
with the little one in the museum at Cairo, a 
tragedy of long ago. 

With the accession of the High Priest to the 
throne, the high priesthood ceased to be a separate- 
ly hereditary office. King after king, of the 
Twenty -first and Twenty-second Dynasties, in 
trying to control the Temple as well as the state, 
added to the priestly revenue, but placed a son of 
his own, usually not the crown prince, in the High 
Priest's position. Then it was brother against 
brother, the strong house divided against itself, 
while the High Priests, one after another, again 
sought to found a separate line. 

The long story was drawing to a close. 

The Egypt of the Twenty-second Dynasty was a 
feudal state. 

Under the next, the nation went utterly to 
pieces, back to the small component parts which 
preceded the two kingdoms in pre-historic days. 

Outside, the possessions in Asia were long gone. 
In spite of reminiscences of Egypt's power, which 
always caused an Egyptian party in Israel, Egypt 
had in reality become the derision of the petty 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 97 

states she once so freely chastised. And even 
while the city kings of the Delta struggled with one 
another within Egypt, they looked fearfully over 
the border and beheld the new Empire of Assyria 
arising in the East — gaining power as Egypt de- 
clined, consolidating as Egypt disintegrated. Al- 
ready those border states which had once con- 
stituted Egypt's Empire, now made the Empire 
of Assyria. All that the Delta rulers, each with 
his individual instinct of self-preservation, could 
do, backed by the former greatness of Egypt, was 
to stir up revolt against the new authority in those 
states that lay between. 

But while the petty princes of Egypt wrestled 
with one another and watched the East, a dark- 
ness came up from the south. Their first con- 
queror was of their own making, though possibly 
they knew it not. The foundations were laid in 
the struggles of the previous dynasty with the 
priesthood of Thebes. In the gradual destruction 
of the state, the priesthood had pulled down the 
house about its own head. 

But Nubia, long Egyptianized by Egyptian 
colonists and customs, long held by Amon and 
never lost as the Asiatic provinces had been, — 
Nubia, the farthest, the last to be disturbed by 
internal disaster, was the last refuge of the god. 
Thebes was between it and the power which was 
in the north. At some time in the Twenty-second 
Dynasty there had been a flight into Nubia of the 
priests. In the Twenty -third Dynasty Egypt 



98 OUT OF EGYPT 

became aware of a new state, with its capital 
Napata, far up at the 4th Cataract. Amon was 
its god and it was elaborately organized as a sacer- 
dotal state, possessing all which Egypt had ever 
known. So mysterious its origin and remote its 
position, that the later Greeks, fascinated by the 
romance of its existence and its culture, looked 
back upon it as the source of civiUzation in Egypt, 
and therefore in the world. Nevertheless, we 
known now the true story of Ethiopia. 

About 720 B. C. Piankhi, a king of this kingdom 
of Ethiopia, marched forth to the temporary con- 
quest of Egypt. He used the Delta kings against 
one another as later, in Europe, Phihp Augustus 
used Richard and John. The Twenty-fifth Dy- 
nasty were Ethiopians: Shabaka, who established 
Pianklii's line in Egypt, and Taharka, whose name 
we know in Hebrew story. The petty principali- 
ties into which Egypt had been broken, became 
vassal states of Nubia. The political power of 
the Theban High Priest of Amon was gone. But 
the new kings kept the Pharaonic titles and revered 
the gods of Egypt. They built on the Karnak 
temple at Thebes and they moved to the north and 
even dreamed of recovering the lost Empire. 

As a beginning and in order to at least protect 
their country from that threatening danger which 
was lowering in the East, they attempted another 
stirring up of the kingdoms in Palestine and Syria. 
Assyria appeared on their horizon and dealt deadly 
punishment. Several times was Egypt saved, 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 99 

once by the pestilence which destroyed a host of 
the Assyrian army and deHvered Jerusalem, as 
Isaiah had promised Hezekiah; again by a revived 
strength in Egypt. The third time, Memphis fell, 
and Taharka fled southward — only to be reinsta- 
ted by princes and priests as soon as the Assyrian 
had departed. On the commemorative stela of 
Esarhaddon the tables are reversed: Assyria looms 
large — and Egypt is a captive dwarf. 

Seven times in all did an Assyrian knock at the 
gate of Egypt. Three times he crossed the thres- 
hold. The last time the Assyrian army, under 
Ashurbanipal, marched up the long valley and 
sacked Thebes, carrying away, as they had in 
Jerusalem, the gold and silver of the temple, the 
wealth, long held safely in the inviolate temple 
fortresses, after Egypt, swept with the winds of 
conflict, had become a desert. 

Thebes, the religious city, whose glory had been 
as the morning, a material glory such as no city 
of the earth had ever displayed, was now darkened 
and desolated, her very memories desecrated. 

In early conquests, it was always the temple 
which was destroyed, as it was a people's god who 
had fallen — ^the form which their genius gave to 
that which was within them. Nothing could so 
well represent the conquest of their spirit. We 
recall the probably necessary destruction of the 
Mahdi's tomb in the Soudan within our own days. 

At the close of Egyptian history there was a 
brief revival imposed by a Libyan with the aid of 



100 OUT OF EGYPT 

Greek mercenaries. To this time belongs the 
Pharaoh Hophra of Hebrew Scripture. In Egypt 
the sunset went back to the dawn which had been, 
before ever Amon rose supreme. Then came the 
night of ecHpse, with the long and unbroken series 
of conquests by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mo- 
hammedans, French and English. Conqueror 
after conqueror has swept over the land, foreigner 
after foreigner holding it until today. 

This then, is the story of Egypt's national reli- 
gious organization — the end with the beginning — 
a study typical of organization for all time. It is 
form, not in the material world, but in the realm 
of mind. We realize that the image may exist 
even as an idea. 

It will be necessary when we come to enter the 
Temple of Egypt, to begin with the outmost and 
latest building, and work back to the time of 
Egypt's glory. We shall know these kings and the 
part each took in the building of the Temple, shall 
know them in the House of Amon, with their work 
and their records there. From one to another 
they will pass us back to the centre of the golden 
age. So we would know beforehand from the end 
of the story, the true inner significance of the 
Temple, and then forgetting the later details, 
dwell on its perfection, realizing what it represent- 
ed and gave us, — in contrast with something else 
which arose in and came out of Egypt. 

All this as one would overlook Karnak — still 
only partly excavated. Thou Temple of Temples, 



BEFORE THE TEMPLE 101 

not only of Egypt, but of the world, standing for 
the outer form which clothes religion, but empty 
of religion now, thou hast thy message too. 



CHAPTER VII 

The House of Am on 

HAVING thus been initiated in the little 
temple of Khonsu, having, as it were, 
prepared ourselves in the ante-cham- 
ber, we passed out of the gate and 
turned once more toward the fallen form which 
above all things in Egypt, represents the fallen 
state. Not even the remounting of resisting don- 
keys and the roughness of our pilgrimage could 
make us forget that we were now to enter The 
Temple of Egypt itself. 

Our way leads over the billowy sands by the 
south side of the structure. Presently, descend- 
ing a hill, we come round to the front of the great 
pylon, where broken bits of sculpture, recently 
excavated, can no more than indicate a once 
splendid avenue. Since Amenhotep's time, it has 
led from the portal of Karnak, ever advancing to 
encroach upon it, westward to the Nile. This 
pylon, the largest in Egypt, belongs to the Ptole- 
maic period. Though Karnak is in ruins, it is not 
yet complete. The old scaffolding of the workmen 
clings to the giant towers, and marks above all 
else, the desertion and desolation of the temple. 
This gateway was the final seal to the work of 
102 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 103 

Rameses II, by those appreciative foreign rulers 
who did so much to emphasize Egypt and who 
were impartial to all her gods, in whom they found 
their own. Rameses' great hypostyle hall proper- 
ly presupposed a court and a final pylon before it. 
The temple plan, as we have seen, was always 
practically the same: first and outmost the pylon, 
then the outer court with the altar, then the hy- 
postyle hall and vestibules beyond, and lastly, the 
holy of holies, surrounded by a corridor and cham- 
bers. But if, in an attempt to outdo former efforts, 
a larger hypostyle hall was added before the pylon, 
it would again be preceded by a court, and an outer 
pylon in proportion. This series, ever increasing 
in size, was twice added to Karnak, not to mention 
the addition of Thutmose III at the other end. 

As we stand between the modern iron railings in 
the huge open portal, from which the ancient gates 
are long gone, across the court and far beyond, 
door after door shows in diminishing perspective. 
It should be so in a straight line to the inner sanc- 
tuary. Karnak itself is a "Book of the Portals," 
each once the outmost, and all inscribed. On the 
south side a similar line, almost at right angles, 
leads up to the central court. They suggest the 
stages of the mystery. It is a temple behind a 
temple. What must it have been when all the 
doors were closed! 

When we crossed the threshold, we were fortu- 
nate enough to be alone, and we found within the 
court, the largest temple-court in the world, a 



104 OUT OF EGYPT 

vast sunny silence. The pylon before us was a 
double mountain of stone, except in the centre, 
where the masonry was propped with cross sup- 
ports which interfered with our vista. Heaps of 
debris tell the chapters not written otherwise. Out 
of it all, near the centre, blooms one great flower, 
a single rounded shaft, liftmg a lotus capital. 
Taharka of Ethiopia, who fought Sennacherib on 
the side of Israel, at the time that Hezekiah spread 
the Assyrian's letter in the Temple at Jerusalem — 
he it was who reared the lonely lily. It was not 
lonely then. For some reason which has perished 
with the structure, Taharka raised in this foremost 
court, a building of twelve such lotus-pillars, each 
as large as Trajan's column. This one remains to 
tell what the others were. 

The court was placed in front of Rameses' giant 
hypostyle hall by the so-called Bubastide Pharaohs 
of the Twenty-second Dynasty. The origin of 
Sheshonk, founder of the line, who married the 
last daughter of the Theban-Tanite house, de- 
scended from Paynozim and Maatkara, is a matter 
of dispute. He would seem not to have been a 
Libyan, as some scholars suppose, for his name, 
and that of his successors indicates an Eastern 
origin. Was he, the first Sheshonk, "the man of 
Susa, " as Petrie suggests, a Babylonian or Persian 
adventurer at the court and in the service of the 
king? If so, his marriage with the princess Kara- 
mat, of the priestly Twenty-first Dynasty, must 
be one of the lost romances of early days. 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 105 

Thus again the royal line was carried through the 
crown princess, whose name, as it appears, handed 
down in all its variations through this Dynasty, is 
a corruption of Maat-ka-ra, the name of the Tanite 
princess, her ancestress, who came to Thebes, 
and the prenomen of the great Hatshepsut. Like 
those queens, she has the double cartouche of the 
royal ruler in her own right. 

We have seen how each founder of a new dynasty 
brought fresh strength to the contest with the 
internal conditions of Egypt, and for a moment 
rallied her and held back her decline, till the 
strength of the line had diminished, when the 
same thing might occur again. Such a founder of 
a dynasty was this Sheshonk I, the Shishak of the 
Bible, who caught up Egypt from her weakened 
Priest-Pharaohs when they had lost their hold, 
and proved his strength by gaining control, con- 
solidating the country, and inaugurating a new 
dynasty with a powerful reign. He was the friend 
and probable ally of Solomon, and his daughter 
was one of the wives of that king. Having con- 
quered the always obstinate Canaanite city of 
Gezer or Gaza, Sheshonk gave it to this daughter 
that she might appear well in the sight of her 
husband. We are back of the time of Assyrian 
greatness. Egypt was still re-asserting her claims 
in Syria. But Solomon's son Rehoboam did not 
find favor in Sheshonk's eyes. The Pharaoh har- 
bored his rival Jeroboam for some years before 
that Hebrew came to be ruler of the Ten Tribes of 



106 OUT OF EGYPT 

Israel, and Sheshonk finally marched against the 
Judean king, capturing a long list of Palestinian 
cities. The Hebrew prophets tell the story rue- 
fully, yet with a kind of exultation, not neglecting 
to point the moral strongly, since it was difficult to 
keep Israel to the high and abstract conception of 
her spiritual leaders. 

With the life and enterprise of Egypt, temporar- 
ily revived by the fresh stream of tribute flowing 
in from S;^Tia, a building period came again. 
Sheshonk and his successors constructed this great 
Karnak court. We recall how his sons and de- 
scendants, as Pharoahs of the land and High 
Priests of the Temple, strove with one another, 
until the divided house fell. 

To the right, past the small temple of Rameses 
III, which is in the side of the court, we find a door 
in the wall, close to the second pylon. We pass 
through it, for on the wall outside is Sheshonk' s 
record of his conquest of the unfortunate Reho- 
boam, and the list of the cities which he took and 
gave to Amon. If we cannot read them ourselves, 
we know that they are there, and we may find 
them in our Hebrew Scriptures — the Egyptologists 
tell us that many of the names are the same. 
There is in particular that town Yenoam, in south- 
ern Lebanon. We know Thutmose III, 600 years 
before the inscription and long previous to the 
Exodus, had made it one of three captured towns 
which he gave as an endowment to Amon, — and 
with which the colossal fortune of the god, which 
wrecked the state, had begun. 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 107 

There is another name on this wall which has an 
interest for us. Among all the others, Sheshonk 
took the ** Field of Abram. " This is the first time 
in secular history that we find the patriarchal 
name. 

But we leave this wonder on the outer wall, to 
go back into the court and examine the small and 
very perfect temple of one earlier than Sheshonk, 
Rameses III, — set across the side. He was the 
last great Pharaoh of the real Egypt, the Egypt of 
the Empire, and appeared a worthy namesake of 
his great ancestor. But his day, early though it 
appears, came too late. Disintegration had al- 
ready set in, in the state. After all, Egypt had 
reached the limit of her power, she had expressed 
herself in temple building, the last word had been 
said. Though the strong arm of Rameses III held 
back the already weakened Empire, and established 
the line which his father had founded, there were 
no new words in which to tell his story. The 
superlatives had all been used. His records were 
but lifeless imitations, and these he endeavored 
to have made as complete as possible. Emulating 
that other Rameses as a great builder, he raised 
that splendid mortuary temple, which unmarred 
by any further Emperors, remains to us as **Medi- 
net Habu" on the western plain. But for some 
reason, Rameses HI did not attempt to add the 
court to the great hypostyle of his famous ancestor 
at Karnak. That came two dynasties later. 
Whether he wished to leave the stupendous majes- 



108 OUT OF EGYPT 

ty of the hall supreme, or to prevent the final 
crowning of it, who shall say? He built this small, 
but beautiful temple at right angles to the front of 
the larger one, as if to forbid the carrying on of 
that forever. Sheshonk and his successors in- 
cluded this small temple in the wall of their court, 
like a jewel mounted in a ring. 

It is difficult because of the imitations and repeti- 
tion to know the truth about Rameses III. He 
stands here as an Osiris before all the pillars of his 
own small court. Behind are three sanctuaries, 
one for each of the Theban triad. Rameses III 
belonged to the priests. 

Nevertheless, while Rameses lived, Egypt, the 
Empire, still appeared to prosper. But a palace 
conspiracy against his life, brought down his grey 
hairs in sorrow to the grave. 

Is it with a sigh of pity, not only for this sad 
passing of one of the most magnificent of Egypt's 
Pharaohs, but for the transitoriness of all things, 
that we turn away? Yet the temple of Rameses 
III stands firm and strong in spite of 3,000 years. 

We leave the old king in his temple and return 
to our contemplation of the larger building, where 
we shall pass, step by step, through the additions 
of Pharaoh after Pharaoh, reaching front after 
front of the temple, as it was in ever earlier and 
earlier days. 

This second pylon at the back of the great court 
was badly ruined, so badly ruined that only the 
masonry on each side of the door remained in 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 109 

shape, propped up by a series of iron brackets which 
interfered with our perspective view through the 
temple. The pylon was built by Rameses I more 
than a hundred years before the time of the third 
Rameses; and for nearly a thousand years it formed 
the facade of the great state temple. That we 
can, at a glance, thus take in a period of a thousand 
years, thrills us. Poor old Rameses I! He had 
only time to be great in that which his successors 
carried out. He reigned only two years. And 
in the glories of his son and grandson who finished 
his work, it might easily be forgotten that it was 
he who planned this greatest hall in the world, 
using for the back of it, the grand pylon which 
Amenhotep III had made for the front of the 
temple some sixty or seventy years before, and 
setting up his own in front of it. So he planned 
out the area, though it seems that but one of the 
columns inside bears his name. This is surely 
the Hall of Records of the Nineteenth Dynasty; 
the columns and the walls inside and out are 
covered with the inscriptions of the three descend- 
ants of Rameses I. 

The hall in its desolation is not deserted by the 
Sun-god, but all the more is filled with light. It 
lies open to the whole day now, the sunshine 
floods the place. Through the one window which 
retains its shape intact in the broken clear-story, 
the light pours as if it found no other inlet. As 
the sun itself gilds the old, gray stones, we sud- 
denly question, "What's become of all the gold.^" 



110 OUT OF EGYPT 

Then we remember Ashurbanipal and the con- 
querors after him. But there is still color left 
among the capitals. We look up where they seem 
like huge flowers in the sky. The sun's rays point 
out the carvings with startling distinctness; and 
here and there on the columns we catch, chiseled 
indelibly deep, the name of Rameses II, that name 
we know so well. But we shall return to this hall, 
for the sake of which, now that its other glories are 
in ruins, the temple is still famous. 

It is best at first to gain just the general impres- 
sion of its greatness, passing through between the 
columns of the nave and out of Amenhotep's 
portal into the central court, which was the fore- 
court of Amenhotep's temple, — where the glorious 
color is gone; the form alone remains. From here 
we can go out on the north side where, on the 
outer north wall of the hypostyle hall is the story 
of Seti I. 

Seti reigned one year with his father, Rameses 
I, the second and last year of the old king's admin- 
istration. After Ikhnaton and his successors at 
the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty had lost the 
Empire in Asia, and their throne in Egypt, Harm- 
hab, usurper and reorganizer had restored order 
in the kingdom. Then came Rameses I. It was 
the dream of Seti, probably inculcated by his 
father, to recover the Empire. For all that last 
year of Rameses I's life, Seti was preparing the 
army. We can imagine it all — how the eager and 
enthusiastic younger man must have planned it 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 111 

out with his old father, who knew the actual ac- 
complishment would not be vouchsafed to himself. 
When Seti came to the throne, all was ready. 
There had been one year of preparation, there were 
three of battle: — a campaign against the Libyans 
on the Western Delta, and two campaigns in Asia, 
which restored the southern part of the Syrian 
countries. Then for some reason — perhaps a trea- 
ty — ^he ceased his victorious war, never crossing 
the threshold again. 

The first tribute which he had exacted, were logs 
of Lebanon, felled under his supervision, for the 
barge of Amon and the flagstones of the temple at 
Thebes. There was little wood in Egypt. Seti's 
cedar souvenirs were safely floated from the Syrian 
harbors and up the Nile. 

Harmhab had before this, begun the restoration 
of the temples which Ikhnaton had broken. We 
find Seti still restoring, as well as planning colossal 
new works, such as Egypt had not yet beheld. It 
was then that the Empire spoke itseK again, and 
again took shape in the temple forms. 

On this wall is the first record of Rameses II, 
the small person with the minor's lock of hair, close 
behind his father's chariot when Seti smites the 
Libyans. It is that Kttle figure which has so ap- 
pealed to early Egyptologists and lovers of Egyp- 
tian history, who once in the wonder of translating, 
believed all Rameses' stories of his childhood. 
Now come scholars, with a brighter lamp of learn- 
ing, and inform us that the cherished little figure 



112 OUT OF EGYPT 

is — Rameses indeed, and yet a forgerjd It was 
inserted by Rameses himself — not only upon an 
original inscription, but upon another little form 
which had first been inserted over the inscription. 
The color which covered the changes has disap- 
peared, leaving bare the hard fact. We confess a 
disappointment. We do not like to lose an illusion 
concerning our old hero and to accept this story 
instead. But the light of learning is sometimes 
hard. And who was the little figure under his, 
whose form and name are here obliterated.'^ Un- 
doubtedly an elder brother, who had reigned for a 
day, or perhaps without reigning, had persuaded 
his father to place him here for his own future 
reference, but who likewise had not accompanied 
his father to the war. He is gone — without leaving 
us his name — nothing but these faint lines, this 
shadowy wraith. If others were not so positive, 
we could almost be persuaded that the first small 
shape which is turned the opposite way, is also a 
drawing of Rameses himself, which he did not like, 
and had changed. But here and there in the 
length and breadth of Egypt, the savants have 
caught names, perhaps but a portion at a time, 
which seem to prove that there were not only one, 
but two princes older than Rameses! Perhaps 
this first-born died. But if so, and Rameses suc- 
ceeded naturally, his elaborate statements as to 
his own appointment as crown prince, which in 
view of that figure must have been false, would 
have been unnecessary to establish his claim. 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 113 

Those faint lines will insist, not only upon the 
other boy, but upon some great upheaval. 

Ah ! many an intrigue was carried through by the 
aid of the priests of Karnak. Court fictions and 
priestly tales have often effectually hidden the 
historic truth from us even today. Of the kings 
whose usurpation was aided and abetted by priest- 
ly intervention, three were among the greatest 
rulers of Egypt's history: Thutmose HI, the Con- 
queror; Harmhab, the Re-organizer and Lawgiver; 
Rameses II, the great Builder. Perhaps it was 
appropriate that his reign should have been 
brought about and inaugurated by this priestly 
service. 

We return through the ruins of Amenhotep's 
court, and out at the southern entrance. Around 
on the south wall of the hypostyle are Rameses 
II's memoirs. Here is a picture of his famous 
battle of Kadesh, the first battle in the world 
whose records enable us to follow the strategic 
positions of the armies. It is repeated, with the 
epic song to which it gave rise, on Rameses' pylon 
to the Luxor temple, and later and best on his 
Ramesseum, over on the western shore. 

A small wall projecting here is an interesting 
document. On it is carved a copy of the first 
international treaty, to be preserved for us. It 
was concluded by Rameses II with the Hittite 
power, the earliest first-class power with whom 
Egypt had to deal. With this people, the thrilHng 
Kadesh battle had been fought. 



114 OUT OF EGYPT 

Beyond Rameses' records, is the place, not far 
from Sheshonk's victories over Rehoboam, where 
Rameses' son Merneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exo- 
dus, cut his own hymn of victory — over Israel and 
others! It has an interesting explanation. As it 
belongs to a time in Palestine probably before the 
Exodus from Egypt, Petrie believes that it refers 
to those relatives of the Hebrews in Egypt, who 
had remained behind in Syria, and kept up the 
associations of the old traditions. So the song is 
important to us, for it contains the first reference 
to Israel known in history, the Bible records all 
having been written after that. 

While we stood on this side of the Karnak temple, 
excavating was going on — aided by groups of 
children carrying baskets on their heads. One 
group was always here with the baskets to be filled ; 
another was emptying the earth at a distance; an- 
other was on the way. They sang as they passed 
along — a simple procession, when we remembered 
the priests. There was an unsightly hole at our 
feet; but it has yielded up many a treasure in the 
sifting of the earth; small figures which have buried 
themselves all through the sacred soil and escaped 
confiscation for two thousand years. They pass 
now to a museum glory. 

Eastward, back of and slightly above our eleva- 
tion is the sacred lake of the temple, once weirdly 
surrounded by colossal statues which darkened 
over and were reflected in it. Away to the south 
are the several southern pylons, badly broken; 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 115 

among the palm trees, the gate of the Temple of 
Mut in the distance. The further two of the 
ruined pylons were the work of Harmhab, the 
Restorer, who opened up the way for the Nine- 
teenth Dynasty, the line of Rameses. In his day, 
the pylon of Amenhotep III, now the back of the 
hypostyle hall, was the front of the temple, and 
these new pylons led from the side to an entrance 
in the forecourt now about midway of the temple 
length. 

It was the priests who declared Harmhab king 
by an oracle of Amon, on the road between Karnak 
and Luxor at the great procession of the Feast of 
Opet, after the state of anarchy and chaos in which 
the Eighteenth Dynasty had gone out. Gradually 
the priests of Amon had regained the control of 
which Ikhnaton had deprived them. Tutenkha- 
ton, one of the weak successors of the idealist, was 
forced in order to maintain himself, to restore and 
re-instate the priesthood of Amon, and was in 
turn compelled by them to change his name to 
Tutenkhamon. 

When several of these weak rulers had followed 
one another, the general, Harmhab, conspired 
with the priesthood, who announced him before 
the people as divinely appointed to reign. Im- 
mediately after this declaration, Harmhab went 
into his palace which was beside the road, and 
there married a wife of the royal line. This estab- 
lished his claim. As the priestly procession passed 
before the palace bearing the image of the god, it 



116 OUT OF EGYPT 

stopped again to convey the divine sanction and 
confirmation of Harmhab's sovereignty. 

The priests were now ready to \\Teak their re- 
venge. The pylons of Harmhab are especially 
interesting to us because they contain the Temple 
of Aton, which Ikhnaton had caused to be built 
in the garden between Karnak and Luxor, and in 
which service once went on when the great temples 
of Amon were closed. Not one stone of the ideal- 
ist's temple was left standing upon another. These 
solid pylons to the House of Amon were made out 
of the blocks. Today the pylons are almost as 
thoroughly ruined; and the name of Aton on the 
stones, turned inward in building, has now fallen 
outward toward the light. 

Harmhab's task, as that of every restorer after 
every period of disintegration, was the reforming 
and re-organizing of the state, the construction of 
a system of government in which the people, even 
in the smallest and remotest corner, should have 
their lives arranged and made secure. It was the 
temple of the state the sovereign reared. The 
organization, the form to make safe the people's 
life, is always the gift of those who are high in rank 
or intelligence. Not Harmhab alone, though he 
renovated it by a fresh body of laws, but almost 
all the Pharaohs of the Empire had helped to per- 
fect it. To them belonged, not only the conquest 
of the Empire, but this internal construction of the 
state. 

Ikhnaton, following the light, had broken through 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 117 

the conventions of religion and loosed his hold of 
the laws of the land. Harmhab was not following 
an ideal, but was looking to his own power and the 
material welfare of the people. He considered 
that the conventions of religion and law, a careful 
controlling organization, were a necessary safe- 
guard, lest the people, lacking themselves in in- 
spiration, and failing to follow the leader who had 
released them from the bondage of conventions, 
should fall into hopeless confusion. 

It seems necessary to begin every reform through 
the old forms ere the spirit forms the new. When 
Israel first went out of Egypt to develop a purer 
religion, she retained, not only the form of the 
temple, but the order of the priesthood, with the 
High Priest as its head. Harmhab, however, was 
not leading toward any purer religious conception. 
He was not looking up, but rather down at the 
organization of which he was the head. In spite of 
the severity of his penalties, he was a humane man, 
though — as in our judgments of contemporary 
statesmen — there are varying opinions among 
Egyptologists concerning the characters of these 
old heroes. It was for the sake of the people that 
Harmhab made his penalties against bribery and 
corruption extreme. His code was engraved upon 
a huge stela set up in one of these pylons of the 
Aton stones. 

During the best periods of the Empire, all men 
for their own dignity, upheld the king, not strug- 
gling against one another for position, but chosen 
by the king for merit. 



118 OUT OF EGYPT 

At the same time with the re-organization of the 
state, the conventions of reKgion were again fitted 
to the people, but they no longer sprang from new 
life; they were never again more than mere form, 
though the most elaborate ritual and the largest 
temple buildings came after. The priesthoods 
were already revealing their power of influence. 
Even at this time, there was one organization over 
the whole land of Egypt, with the High Priest of 
Amon, of the state temple at Thebes, rising to its 
head. 

Under Harmhab and the earlier Pharaohs of the 
Empire, the state was managed as a vast estate. 
The government existed for the sake of an econo- 
mic prosperity and productivity; and Egypt was 
handled as crown lands might be today. Yet the 
Temple, which represented the ideal of the state, 
was really a counter-organization, already absorb- 
ing land from gifts, and, being untaxed in its lands 
and its wealth, was already disturbing the economic 
proportions. 

Leaving Harmhab and Iklmaton, we turn back 
from the southern pylons, and before this southern 
entrance, we see where a great obelisk once stood. 
It must have pointed the way toward what is now 
the kernel of the temple, and toward that line of 
kings, the mightiest of whom was Thutmose III — 
toward the secret place, and toward the origin of 
all the priestly power. Alas, the temple behind it, 
only too well simulates, in the utter confusion of 
its wreckage, the great feud of the Thutmosid 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 119 

family. They were a house of powerful loves and 
hates. Yet from them, after Thutmose HI, the 
great warrior, sprang Amenhotep III, the lover of 
beauty, and Ikhnaton, the idealist. 

Thutmose IV, he who uncovered the Sphinx 
and who was the father of Amenhotep III, found 
this obelisk of his grandfather, Thutmose III, still 
lying here unraised beside the entrance to the 
temple; and acting less as builder than restorer, he 
caused it to be lifted to the old conqueror's memory 
and his own. It is not here now, for it belongs to 
the spoils of the nations. Egypt is scattered 
through all the kingdoms of the earth. To find 
this obelisk we must journey to the Lateran in 
Rome. 

When Thutmose IV first raised it, there was not 
even this court before us, the forecourt of Amen- 
hotep III, with his big pylon and sphinx avenues. 
This way led across the then front of the temple, 
the true temple of the Thutmosids, in which 
they wrote not only such records as they con- 
sciously caused to be inscribed upon their memorial 
walls, but in their very building revealed the stress 
and strain of their characters. Here the obelisk of 
Hatshepsut towers insistent over all. 

Returning into the court of Amenhotep III, the 
ancient way across the front of the Thutmosid 
temple, but now the middle court of Karnak — we 
find Thutmose I, the father, third king of the 
Eighteenth Dynasty. We must begin with the 
first kings of this line and come down, for its later 



120 OUT OF EGYPT 

monarchs restored what its earlier Pharaohs built. 
The pylon, which formed the front of Thutmose 
I's temple and the back of Amenhotep's later court 
where we stand, is now a confused and confusing 
heap of stones. Beyond this, the ordinary tourist 
can distinguish little in the general wreckage, but 
the scholars know every wall. Thutmose I began 
to make the temple sumptuous, though it was with 
the founder of this Dynasty, Ahmose of Thebes, 
that the rehgion of Amon became the state religion, 
and that what had been a small Middle Kingdom 
temple, back there where the sanctuaries are, be- 
came the temple of the state. 

Nearly 2,000 years of history and periods of 
advanced civilization, lay behind the Empire. 
Ahmose, having expelled the Hyksos usurpers, and 
reorganized the state after the fall of the Middle 
Kingdom, began the restoration of the old temples, 
using the stone from our familiar quarries near 
Helouan, which had once supplied the Pyramids. 

For the Temple of Amon at Thebes, Ahmose 
built a cedar barge and furnished an elaborate 
temple service. But his building energy was 
scattered throughout the land, and the House of 
Amon had as yet scarcely perceived its own im- 
portance. Amenhotep I, the son of Ahmose, 
added a beautiful gate to the little temple, but a 
change in the level of the Nile made it necessary 
in a later reign to destroy this portal. Then came 
Thutmose I, and with him began the building of 
the temple. The small state sanctuary was not 



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THE HOUSE OF AMON 1^1 

worthy the widening importance of the Empire. 
This Emperor planned to construct a larger build- 
ing, which should include the ancient chambers. 

The width of the temple he made practically 
what it has been ever since; and all across it — 
between this broad outer pylon of his and the old 
sanctuary, he placed his hypostyle hall. The 
whole was an imposing Structure for his day; and 
he set up his obelisks before the entrance, one of 
which is that tall shaft now in front of us. The 
nearest southern pylon, which we have left be- 
hind us, at right angles to this front, is also his. 
The columns which bore the ceiling of Thutmose's 
hall on either side of the nave, were originally 
cedar of Lebanon. So that some six hundred 
years before the building of the temple at Jerusa- 
lem, we find the cedar of Lebanon used in the 
building of the national temple at Thebes, for the 
columns in the hall before the holy of hoKes. 

In this place originated the power of the priests 
of Amon; and this ground whereon we stand was 
the scene of one of the most dramatic episodes in 
Egyptian history — ^for within this hall was its 
builder, Thutmose I, deprived of his throne. 

As Breasted gives us the story, in the royal fami- 
ly was a prince Thutmose, who possessed no right 
to succeed to the sovereignty of Egypt. There- 
fore was he destined for the priesthood. Such an 
arrangement, even back in the Eighteenth Dy- 
nasty, had the effect, not of giving the royal family 
control of the priesthood, but of introducing a 



122 OUT OF EGYPT 

force from without to tear asunder the family. 

In those days there was a royaHst party in 
Egypt, against which the party of the priesthood 
made its first trial of strength. Of the children of 
Thutmose I, the only one who grew up with a full 
title to the throne was his daughter Hatshepsut, 
the royal daughter of a royal wife. The party 
who stood for the direct descent overcame all 
difficulties, and compelled her father to name her 
as his successor. However, the priestly prince 
Thutmose was quietly gaining the support of the 
priesthood. Finally, as was done more than once 
in the history of Egypt, the coveted position was 
won by a marriage with the heiress to the title . 
This was the claim of his own father to the throne 
of Egypt. In the case of Prince Thutmose and 
Hatshepsut, it would appear, from a surface view 
of its effects, to have been purely a manage de con- 
venance of 3,500 years ago. 

We cannot tell how this prince and princess may 
have planned together — or whether, indeed, Hat- 
shepsut desired to wed Thutmose. Considering 
the insistent qualities, which that youth as a war- 
rior subsequently displayed, we can imagine it 
quite possible that the old king yielded to strong 
and subtle influences, and weary of importunities, 
gave Hatshepsut to the prince. Perhaps also, the 
king arranged it, to make sure of the descent 
through his line, since some Egyptians might ob- 
ject to a queen alone. On the other hand, con- 
sidering also that Hatshepsut herself dominated 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 123 

her husband, keeping him absolutely in the back- 
ground while she lived, and thus proving herself 
the most royal descendant of her house, we can- 
not believe that she was married against her own 
consent. 

Neither do we understand whether the father 
himself was aware of the deepest plots of the prince. 
But when Hatshepsut's mother died, the claim of 
Thutmose I, which he had held through his wife, 
passed by the same law to the prince, Thutmose, 
whose wife was the daughter of that queen. The 
moment had arrived. It seems like a fairy tale 
to us, though to them it was doubtless real enough. 
The old king in his temple hall, offering to the god 
upon a feast day before the assembled people; his 
son with the priests among the cedar columns on 
the northern side. The procession, as was cus- 
tomary, bore the image of the god from the sanc- 
tuary, but it appeared to be seeking among the 
pillars, until it came to the young prince, who fell 
upon his face. By the oracle of the god he was 
led to the spot where his father had stood, and 
where only the king might be. Thus did the 
spokesmen of Divine sanction already make and 
unmake Emperors. 

Both the royalist and priestly parties were 
satisfied. Thutmose III, as he is known to his- 
tory, forthwith began to reign, while Thutmose I 
retired to a more or less restful seclusion. At 
first the new king attempted to rule without con- 
sidering his royal wife. In the political struggle 



124 OUT OF EGYPT 

which immediately ensued, he lost his carefully 
planned-for power and became no more in reality 
than the Prince Consort. Hatshepsut, his strong 
and beautiful queen, was the true sovereign of 
Egypt. She now began her memorial, that most 
exquisite, terraced temple on the western shore. 

But at this point the reign of the two was broken 
briefly by that of another brother, Thutmose II, 
in alliance with the father. Bitterly they turned 
against Hatshepsut, erasing her name from her 
own temple and placing theirs upon it. Thutmose 
I died during the reign of this son; and Thutmose 
II, perceiving that the real power against him was 
the party of Hatshepsut, and understanding the 
situation between herself and her husband, allied 
himself with Thutmose III. Together they held 
the government for a short period. On the death 
of Thutmose II, Thutmose III was again unable 
to keep the authority in his hands, and was forced 
to a reconciliation with his royal wife. Again 
they reigned together, and again Thutmose III 
disappeared from sight. 

Hatshepsut's sun had now risen clear. Her 
partisans, who would rise or fall with her, took 
heed to steadfastly uphold her rule. In the reliefs 
of her new temple, which she now had carried to 
perfection, it was shown that she had been divinely 
intended to be Queen, as the child of the Sun-god ; 
lier birth, in accordance with court convention and 
folk tradition, attended by miracles. She is also 
pictured as nurtured by Hathor, crowned by the 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 125 

gods, and appointed to rule by Thutmose I. He 
was recorded as saying, "Who shall speak evil of 
her majesty shall die. "* 

The country under Hatshepsut, now entered 
upon a period of peaceful prosperity, of commerce, 
of exploration, of building and of art — while Thut- 
mose in did the duties of a priest. Hatshepsut 
was the first great woman whose name and deeds 
belong to history. It was at this time that the 
Priesthood of Egypt had just been organized into 
a whole, with the High Priest of Amon at its head, 
and the present High Priest was also vizier of 
Egypt, and Hatshepsut's devoted partisan — so 
that the priests also were now with her. It would 
make an interesting story could we know the real 
wishes of the old adherents of the family through 
all these troublous times, and especially the 
thoughts of the family themselves: — if there were 
beneath ambitious struggles, contrary personal 
feelings. We cannot trust the official words of 
praise or blame. Hatshepsut's favorite was the 
teacher of Thutmose Ill's childhood, to whom she 
gave in trust the education and the fortune of her 
little girl. Thutmose I's old general had super- 
intended the care of this little one when she was 
an infant. Also the architect of Thutmose I, 
who had built the Karnak hall, now constructed 
Hatshepsut's temple. Whether her father him- 
self, who had carved a path of conquest across 
Asia to the Euphrates and had established firmly 
the Egyptian Empire, had been later in the posi- 

*Breasted 



126 OUT OF EGYPT 

tion of King Lear, listening to first one and then 
another of his children, who shall ever say? 
Though he chiseled out her name in her temple, 
Hatshepsut erected her Karnak obelisks to him, 
and made one tomb for him and for herself. But 
the standard of filial expression in Egypt was high. 

That tallest obelisk rising over the wreckage is 
hers — the top of the other lies here. On that 
ninety-foot page is inscribed, as a charming Ameri- 
can woman expressed it, the first "woman's post- 
script. " For writ large down the shaft is the story 
of how Hatshepsut raises it to the honor and glory 
of her father, the great Thutmose I; and at the 
bottom is the naive addition, "And to my honor 
and glory too. " 

The huge blocks had been brought on a barge 
from Assouan and there were well-nigh a thousand 
rowers in the boats which drew them to Thebes. 
The tops were covered with electrum,' whose shin- 
ing, lighted by the rays of the Sun-god, could be 
seen from afar. One was supposed to flood the 
North, or Lower Egypt, and the other, the South, 
with light. 

No wonder the traders who now filled the 
country spread the glories of Hatshepsut over 
Syria. Well might she have sung: 

"The thousand rowers bring my obelisks; 
The wandering Bedoui carry my fame. " 

Strangely enough the Queen set up these shafts 
in this hall ; wrecking it in the process, for the roof 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 127 

had to be broken and many of the cohimns de- 
stroyed. Though in her father's name, their shin- 
ing overthrew her father's hall, the hall in which 
he himself had been overthrown by Thutmose III ; 
and they cast the place into utter confusion. 

The tomb which Hatshepsut made beside her 
temple on the other side of the river, was not used 
by Thutmose I. Probably he had made other 
arrangements — and we know that, not trusting 
his memorials to posterity, he had, as was usual, 
provided for his own mortuary service in the 
temple of Abydos. 

When, after a reign of some fifteen years, Hat- 
shepsut died, Thutmose Ill's resentment toward 
her was revealed. It was so deep that he not only 
mutilated the reliefs of her beautiful temple, cut- 
ting out for a second time her name wherever it 
occurred, but he also destroyed or disfigured the 
tombs and statues of all those who had stood 
nearest her, including his old tutor and the High 
Priest of Amon. 

The fallen masonry which adds to the debris 
about us here in Karnak was the sheath he built to 
hide Hatshepsut's name upon her obelisks. But 
their clear shining overhead must have constantly 
annoyed his sight. 

When we thought how Hatshepsut's body had 
not yet been found, we could not but wonder why. 
Could Thutmose III, Napoleon of Egypt though he 
became, so violate Egyptian beHefs as to destroy 
it? That seemed so impossible that we scarcely 



128 OUT OF EGYPT 

liked to utter the thought aloud. We preferred to 
believe that faithful friends, not risking the temp- 
tation to this crime far worse than murder, con- 
cealed her more securely than even the other royal 
ones were hid. 

Once freed, Thutmose showed himself a con- 
summate general, who carried the advance of 
Egypt beyond his father's borders, beyond the 
Euphrates, beyond what was ever accomplished 
before or since in Asia. Returning from a magni- 
ficent campaign for a triumph in Thebes, he was 
faced with an odd situation. Naturally his tri- 
umph took the form of temple festivals, and his 
glory was made visible by the magnitude of his 
offerings to the state god. In the hall where he 
had been summoned to reign and where he cele- 
brated his first Victory Feast, he made the first 
great endowment to Amon. For it was then that 
he gave, not only silver and gold and precious 
stones, but Yenoam and the two other towns of 
the Lebanon to the state temple — beside much 
land in Egypt to be worked by his captives. It 
was not in those days, '*He that hath pity on the 
poor lendeth to the Lord. " Giving to Amon was 
presenting to the temple cities, land, serfs and 
income. In this way Thutmose III began the 
estabhshment of the wealth of this temple and 
this priesthood far above all others. 

But the state had now grown beyond even the 
new temple of his father, the only fine hall of which 
was marred and broken by those persistent obelisks 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 129 

of his dead queen. He had himself added to its 
destruction by walling up the shafts. Doubtless 
he would have liked to destroy the temple entirely 
and begin again. But building takes long, and a 
king's glory is as much in his inheritance as in his 
own achievement. He magnifies himself in mag- 
nifying his ancestors. Thutmose III had his own 
special temple on the western shore. This temple 
of Karnak was already the state temple of his 
fathers, and the place where he himself had been 
called to the kingship. What could he do with it? 
It was spoiled for him, yet he could not desert it. 
He attempted some restoration of the hall, setting 
up stone pillars in place of the cedar ones, on the 
northern side where he had stood on that memor- 
able occasion. Then he seems to have given up 
the hall; and all that portion of the temple. Re- 
turning from a second campaign, he turns his back 
upon all that part which since the beginning has 
been the front of the building; and plans his great 
hall of triumph clear across the other end. At the 
feast of the New Moon, a feast we find also kept 
in Israel, were held the foundation ceremonies. 
About the hall and the body of the temple were a 
large number of other chambers in which Thut- 
mose now wrote his own records, and remembered 
the kings who preceded him. His list of them is 
in the National Library in Paris. So, in the temple 
was also preserved his work as an historian. In 
addition to this, on the walls has been discovered 
the first account of a botanical and zoological 



130 OUT OF EGYPT 

garden, the garden of the temple where he placed 
his specimens from Asia. Plants and animals are 
pictured here, which were hitherto unknown to 
Egypt. We must not forget that at this time, 
Luxor was yet an unimportant little Middle King- 
dom sanctuary. The avenues of sphinxes and 
the great garden between the two temples were 
probably undreamed of. It was for this king's 
great-grandson to plan those. In his day, Thut- 
mose's festival hall was supreme, and even today 
it is beautiful, as we discover for ourselves when 
we have climbed over the hills of difficulty made 
by the ruined walls of all the inner chambers, and 
have entered it. The glorious color shines out 
festive still. 

Here ends the first chapter of the building of the 
temple. We have been through all the divisions, 
for in passing through the temple itself, we were 
obliged to begin with the latest. Slowly we wan- 
der back and thread the maze around the small 
Middle Kingdom sanctuary, the kernel of the 
whole, the centre where all began, which in spite 
of changes and additions, was the sanctuary until 
the end. The lily columns of Thutmose III, from 
the little forecourt of this holy place, are standing 
yet. The southern one bears the papyrus of the 
South; the other, the lotus of the North. The 
priest passed in between them. This division of 
Egypt persisted from pre-historic days, and the 
fact that the state temple at Thebes faced west, 
made it possible symbolically to divide its pairs of 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 131 

obelisks and columns. As we look at the sculp- 
tured flowers we realize how, before the beginning, 
the pre-historic kingdoms had their national 
flowers, their national colors, their kings, their 
priests, their temples, and their belief in immortal 
life. 

After Thutmose III, from time to time, the 
temple was restored and added to. His son, Amen- 
hotep II, put right the hall of Thutmose I, and re- 
ported it on the stonework around Hatshepsut's 
obelisks, and henceforth, despite Thutmose's festal 
hall, this end was the front of the temple. 

We have read the book of the records of the 
kings, unsealed for us within a hundred years. 
In the temple we are back in the Empire again. 
We forget the loss, remembering only the gains. 
Here we have found the details of a story which 
lives again. The kings have explained themselves 
to us. It was not enough that they should build, 
but in their buildings they should leave their 
names. 

Here, then, was the little structure of Ahmose I, 
who laid the foundation of the Empire; there, was 
once the gate of his son Amenhotep I. We return 
toward the front, in the order of the kings; through 
the hall of Thutmose I, with the towering memo- 
rial of his daughter, the masonry of Thutmose III, 
and the restorations of the latter's son, Amenhotep 
II. Outside the southern entrance was the obe- 
lisk raised by Thutmose IV. Crossing the court 
of Amenhotep III, we can look through that south- 



132 OUT OF EGYPT 

ern portal where the pylons of Harmhab contain 
the temple of Ikhnaton. We enter again the 
great hall, planned by Rameses I, and partly 
built on the northern half by Seti. 

These are they who preceded Rameses II, and 
who prepared the Temple. Even Ikhnaton, 
against what he willed, cut stones for it. And as 
Karnak, more than anything else, represents what 
Egypt stood for, so also does Rameses more than 
any king. 

Here in the great hall of columns we rest. 
Above is that one window in the room, where day- 
light floods the place. We may wander among 
the giant pillars, yet the size of the hall defies our 
comprehension. The largest ever built, it is, 
because of its time, more wonderful than any 
ancient or modern building; and, strengthened by 
the modern world, it will stand when the modern 
world has passed, — still proudly bearing on its 
walls the first strategic battle record, the first 
masterpiece of composition in art, and the first 
attempt at an epic — and after Rameses' records, 
on the further wall, with no hint of its significance, 
the first historic mention of Israel. 

From end to end of Egypt, Rameses built, telling 
over and over his story, and setting up his figure 
in the most titanic monolithic statues ever pro- 
duced. It was the result of that re-organization 
of the state and re-conquest of the Empire which 
came just before him, and in the beginning of his 
reign. With Rameses the Empire exhausted it- 



THE HOUSE OF AMON 133 

self, as it did in the days of the Pyramid builders. 
Once it had spent itseK on the tombs of its god-like 
kings; now it gave all it had to the kingly temples 
of the gods. 

Excess of power, like that of Rameses, marks a 
culmination. The very imitation which follows 
it, stifles the life that remains. 

Egypt had once for all expressed herself in form. 
Her decadence was necessary, in order that other 
nations might arise with their contributions to the 
future of the world. A control for the sake of 
tribute, only maintained by constant warfare, 
could not last. In such holding of a state, the 
peace which follows conquest, must ever be giving 
way to fresh conquest. 

That Egypt as Egypt was to endure forever — 
that would not have been progress. The history 
of the world is not a continuous evolution — one 
thing develops in Egypt, another in Syria. But 
in the enduring Temple which she built, we shall 
realize that what Egypt gave us was something 
apart. 

Still in thought, we traverse the ancient avenue 
of sphinxes to Karnak, Temple of Temples, — at 
once so ruined and so vast that it defies remem- 
brance, save as an unspeakable greatness. Only 
in the full moonlight may it be seen in all its splen- 
dor, when Hathor's shining conceals the ruin and 
restores the building by her magic to a more than 
earthly beauty. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Valley of the Shadow 

AMON-RE, the Sun, was shining as he 
shone three thousand years ago. Re- 
flected in the water, the only way that 
we might gaze upon him, he spread his 
wings of morning when we crossed the river at 
Thebes. There were only we two and Aboudi, 
and the donkey -boys and the donkeys; but the 
plain was peopled for us. We had come to that 
shore, the land of the setting Sun, where in the 
barren cliffs which border the Theban plain, the 
inhabitants themselves of the vanished city of 
Thebes, lie deep in the rocks, asleep ! 

We drew up to pay homage at the feet of the 
two Colossi who guard the path to the whole of 
this Western realm, the figures of Amenhotep III. 
The temple which stood behind them is gone, the 
yearly waste of waters had subsided, and they 
gazed serenely on fresh green fields surging to their 
thrones. We felt overawed again in approaching 
this king — too mighty to take note of us — he who 
had thus magnified for the ages, and made lasting, 
his material form to receive us. He is questioning 
the centuries, to give his message to that which 
shall understand. Yet some of the treasures which 

184 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 135 

he guards and which have so long been held in 
Hathor's keeping — Moon-goddess, who is Nature 
or Love — may not last another hundred years. 

As we left the statues we could picture the 
cavalcade of Bent-Anat, sister of her who found 
Moses, rise out of the dust before us, coming round 
from the Valley of the Kings to Seti's University;* 
and we rode a galloping race remembering how 
she tried her chariot horses against Paaker's 
Syrian-bred. So we entered the tortuous way 
that leads for miles to the heart of the mountains, 
while the barren heights closed round us, and no 
blade of grass, no living thing, in all that desert 
waste, was visible. 

Strangest of all strange places is that far-hidden 
Valley behind the bare mountains back of the 
Theban plain, mountains which have yielded 
treasure far more valuable than gold. For here 
the Pharaohs made themselves fastnesses to be 
secure to the present day. Their hiding-places 
have been opened now. The three milleniums 
during which, inscriptions tell us, these kings be- 
lieved they were to he in darkness, have passed 
over the mountain crests above them; and the 
graves have yielded up their secrets. Within a 
hundred years Egypt, with the pictures of her life' 
sealed away quite perfect for us, has been unlocked 
to the modern world, the buildings opened, the 
key found to the writing on the walls. The for- 
gotten language is read once more, the ocean of 
Time is crossed; and the unknown life with all its 

♦Uarda. 



136 OUT OF EGYPT 

daily customs, its beliefs and its ideals, is seen in 
paintings, fresh as of yesterday. Herodotus might 
be deceived by the Egyptians themselves; but 
through this hidden portrayal of the secrets of 
their lives, we know. 

Black holes in the spurs of the hills are the re- 
opened entrances. There were robbers in Egyp- 
tian days whose rolling away of the stone from the 
mouth of the pit was to be feared. 

The iron gates of the Committee of Antiquities 
unclosed before our passes. Electric light illum- 
ines the tombs during certain hours of the morning. 
By what light were accomplished the wonderful 
paintings and inscriptions, which cover the walls 
of the passages and the tomb chambers .^^ Doubt- 
less the same strong steady glow by which were 
done in other parts of Egypt and in earlier times, 
the work, so perfect in every minute detail, on 
inner walls of living rock. This, the Egyptians 
have not explained for us yet. 

We entered an opening in the cliff which ends 
the Valley; and three hundred feet down into the 
foundation of the mountain our little company 
penetrated, over a bridge across a once impassable 
pit to a chamber fresh from the painter's hand. 
In a deeper place at one end lay the king Amen- 
hotep II, as he had lain since near four thousand 
years, some centuries before the days of Moses. 
The lid of the sarcophagus has been removed and 
we looked upon his face. . . . Suddenly, how- 
ever, a crowd of tourists surged in upon us with a 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 137 

strident-voiced conductor, who shattered the spell 
and the silence. Yet the king's majesty of repose 
could not be disturbed — as with Bahram, the great 
hunter, ''the wild ass stamps o'er his head but can- 
not break his sleep." 

We came out into the light of heaven only to go 
down into another tomb, that of Merneptah, the 
Pharaoh of the Exodus. His finely carved sarcop- 
hagus in an upper chamber has never been used; 
but upon the lid in the lower vault lies a colossal 
white figure of the king, in an eternal sleep. 

From this barren resting-place we went to that 
of his grandfather Seti, the most beautiful of the 
tombs and one discovered long ago, but empty of 
the king when found. 

Through the underground passage of Seti's 
tomb we descended into the realm of the shades. 
Upon its walls and chambers before Moses was 
born, was written with human figures the Egyp- 
tian Bible of that time : the story of the passage of 
the soul after death; and the judgment of God, 
represented by the Sun, placing at his right hand 
the blessed, at his left, the damned. 

How strange these days of travelling are ! Early 
in the morning we had said: "Today we shall go to 
the Valley of the Kings, " with a vague idea, as is 
gained from books, of what was in store for us. 
Afterward, the Valley was an experience, a part of 
our identity because a memory infused into and 
transforming our being. 

We stood upon a mountain crest with that weird 



138 OUT OF EGYPT 

Valley of the Dead behind us; and there stretched 
before, the fertile river valley, even to Karnak, 
"the National Sanctuary," "the Throne of the 
World," on the other side. The funeral temples 
of the West lay in a line on the desert's edge below 
us; and at the foot of the precipice on which we 
stood was the ravine of Der-el-Bahri with its ter- 
raced temple opposite to Karnak, and once con- 
nected with it by an avenue of sphinxes, only 
broken by the silver stream. 

Aboudi, standing in his black robes on the edge 
of the precipice, stretched out his arm, and we 
listened again to the story of the return of the 
Pharaoh. 

We knew with what care the Pharaohs were laid 
away, and hidden again from time to time as anci- 
ent robbers discovered their hiding-place. Was it 
not with the intention that those very bodies might 
again see the light after three thousand years? 

But although at the end of this time a key to 
the Egyptian language had been found, and the 
records read for a hundred years, the search for the 
great of Egypt had been in vain. 

Those tombs back in the Valley were so many of 
them empty; and Rameses, the great king, had 
not been discovered. And then — ^traces, tokens, 
began to float down from Thebes to Cairo on the 
stream of tourists : scraps of papyrus, jewels, some- 
times what had been a human hand or foot. Mod- 
ern Egyptian robbers had made a find and were 
selling as much as they could, unconscious that 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 139 

they were thus forwarding a mute appeal for help 
against themselves. 

Authorities came to Luxor, but nothing could 
wring from the people the secret which meant for 
them wealth. At last was found the native family 
from whom the treasures emanated, but neither 
bribes nor imprisonment could move them — until 
one, realizing that they could dispose of no more 
booty, told for the sake of the reward. And im- 
mediately, in the burning July weather, three men, 
Emile Brugsch and his two assistants, came to 
Thebes. 

They met the surly ruffian. Led by him among 
the lonely scorching mountains, with a waiting 
crowd of cut-throats whose secret was to be sold, 
behind them, Mr. Brugsch and his two assistants 
clambered around the rocks until, beyond a bould- 
er, was discovered a heap of stones. "That is it," 
said the robber. 

With a hastily constructed tackle the English- 
man was lowered unto a pit some fifty feet in 
depth. What he found in the horizontal passage 
opening from the pit and in the great tomb chamber 
at the end, made even this strong man faint. He 
hurried back lest he lose consciousness in this vast 
grave and his secret die with him. After what 
he had beheld he desired to live but one more day 
at least till his message could be given to the world. 

Revived by the air, he recalled the forty royal 
ones imprisoned in that tomb, and how from their 
torn wrappings the faces of the mighty had looked 



140 OUT OF EGYPT 

upon him. Later, it was seen that so perfect was 
everything, even a wasp fallen on the flowers on 
the breast of Thutmose III had been preserved. 

And in the corridor lay the second Rameses, 
Rameses the Great ! 

That night three hundred Arabs were engaged, 
squads to work and other squads to watch them; 
and for four days, night and dsiy, a marvellous 
procession passed. It bore King Rameses in his 
royal company, kings and queens and priests, along 
the crest from which the temples they had reared 
might still be seen. So they wound down from 
the heights, to the plain and the boats at the river 
side. The news of their coming had preceded 
them down the Nile; and once more, as over three 
thousand years ago, an exceeding great cry went 
up from Egypt; all Egypt was in mourning, weep- 
ing and wailing for Pharaoh along the river banks. 

So the great ones came to Cairo, where they 
keep perpetual state, saved and brought to the 
light by alien northerners more than three thousand 
years after they were interred. Yet, — would they 
could be shielded from the gaze of the irreverent, 
even as Seti prayed, in an inscription on his white 
sarcophagus : 

"May the impious not take possession of me!"* 

Was it Death of which the Egyptians were chiefly 
conscious — with their figure of a mummy at every 
feast, — Death which carved the memorials, pre- 
served the very bodies, lasting till today? 

*Rawn8ley. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 141 

The Rosetta Stone has given the clue to the lost 
language; so that men understand those pictures 
without background or perspective, yet with 
meaning in every proportion; know the very 
sounds of the words; read the inscriptions and 
maxims. The family relations, even the nurses, 
poets, architects are known to us; those things 
which in the great of all ages typify our own rela- 
tions and make the rulers living to us. More than 
all, Hght is thrown upon those Hebrew scriptures, 
which have become the Bible of our race. 

Yet in spite of all our knowledge those closed 
silent lips of the Pharaohs keep back many a 
secret, and the more we know, the more we feel 
the unsolvable mystery of how they thought. 



CHAPTER IX 

The City of the King 

IT is still to the temples that we must go to 
dream of the Pharaohs awake. 
Upon another day we visited Der-el-Bahri, 
the memorial of Hatshepsut, sometimes called 
Hatasu, royal daughter of Thutmose I. 

The name of her temple is thus explained. 
Many of these buildings were used as convents in 
the Christian period, and the Arabic word for con- 
vent is "Der." Der-el-Bahri, Convent of the 
North, ancient temple of Hatshepsut, has not been 
long uncovered. 

Terraced to the mountain wall, in the living 
rock of which its holy of holies is hidden, the temple 
is a departure in Egyptian architecture and re- 
veals a wonderful sense of proportion, and skill 
in the outdoor use of the colonnade. 

Behind one of these colonnades is the story of 
the birth of the queen and her nourishing by the 
goddess Hathor. Behind another is the famous 
"Expedition to Punt, " one of those pictures whose 
impression is clear and indelible in our minds, not 
a composite impression, like the "Victories" and 
"Gods"; because this picture, like the Semitic 
people in the tomb at Beni-Hassan, like the festival 

142 



THE CITY OF THE KING 143 

in Luxor, fills in a distinct and separate chapter in 
Egyptian history. The marvellous skill with 
which the Egyptian boat is drawn, holds our atten- 
tion; the cargo, the very fish, the land of Punt with 
its houses in the tree-tops and its cattle resting 
beneath — all the story of this voyage of discovery 
to a treasure country of old is graphically told. 
The military escort for this temple expedition re- 
calls, despite its different equipment and 3,500 
years, the military escort for the Mecca caravan 
which we saw a month or so ago. 

However, the wonderful terraced temple is the 
evidence that hate as well as love, may be undying 
through many centuries; for here Thutmose III 
has left a record of himself in the mutilated places 
where the queen's figure was portrayed. 

Medinet-Habu, that teniple of Rameses III, 
is also to be visited. In its still lovely colors life 
gleams among the ruins. "Look at the King!" 
cried Aboudi, before the great symbol of Victory, 
which we are learning to recognize. " He showing 
his God all those people he conquered; and he 
telhng his God how much trouble he have in con- 
quering those people." Aboudi, descendant of 
the ancient Egyptians, has a gentle, melancholy 
voice which seems to come softly down from a far 
distance. But it is at the Ramesseum that we 
hear him best, it is the Place of Rameses that will 
live the longest in our memories. 

All ruined — ^that Ramesseum. The Committee 
of Antiquities can place no gates where there are 



144 OUT OF EGYPT 

no enclosing walls. Weeds grow among the shat- 
tered fragments of the colossal pink statue in the 
open court. Here and there we find a hand or a 
foot, which seems as if belonging to some more 
than human figure. " How are the mighty fallen ! ' ' 
comes involuntarily to our lips — but the power of 
the mighty remains. The pillars of the temple 
stand up beautiful in their unprotected desolation. 
Ruin, the "charm beyond perfection," suggesting 
always the freeing of spirit, enfolds them in an 
atmosphere of poetic tragedy. 

The first great tower-gate is a fallen heap of 
stone upon its outside, threatening to let down the 
whole — yet we trace the carving on the side 
towards the court. The second gate stands firm 
and strong, braced by modern masonry; for, more 
perfect than in Karnak or in Luxor, on its inner 
wall, close behind the guardian columns of Osiris, 
facing the inner court, is the greatest picture of 
Egypt. The first real composition, forerunner of 
Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, this epic in 
sculpture and painting illustrates the first epic of 
literature. 

The heroic figure of Rameses, today towers 
supreme over all his enemies, — not only of that 
time but of all succeeding ages, and of Time him- 
self. "Ramsie the Great!" said Aboudi. He 
would not for the world have consciously used a 
diminutive, for his voice was full of a touching 
reverence and pride ; but the French pronunciation 
has a caressing, endearing sound, which somehow 



THE CITY OF THE KING 145 

makes the king human and living for us. In his 
simple English, Aboudi told of the battle; and we 
who knew the poem, found fresh pleasure in his 
telling. He pointed out where the princes and 
generals were all going the wrong way, leaving 
Ramsie their king, "alone and no man with him." 
"He pray to his God," said Aboudi reverently; 
"maybe his God help him, else how he conquer 
all those people.^" He showed us the conquered 
warriors fleeing before the single-handed might 
and vengeance of the king; and a fire and enthusi- 
asm touched him — till we realized that Ramsie was 
king of his land, and still belongs to him. 

Then and there was solved our problem of dis- 
tracted interest between the Present and the Past. 
Before that picture in the temple we felt how the 
Egyptian life goes on much as it did of old; and we 
found the Past in the Present. 

We were no longer even aware of the veneer of 
Orientalism which has been cast upon Egypt by 
the Mohammedan religion, for we knew that land 
as the first country of our Western civilization, 
its people as the first people of the West. The 
depths of religion underly us all. 

Aboudi revealed to us the realistic humor in the 
picture; where the hosts fall into the river, and 
friends on the opposite bank pull them out and 
hold the Aleppo chieftain upside down to empty 
the water from his mouth. Those old Egyptians 
understood that ridicule is the last and deadliest 
weapon, which leaves nothing of the foe. 



146 OUT OF EGYPT 

There is color in the picture; the river flows blue, 
surrounding the city of Kadesh with a moat, — one 
can see the bridge over which the helpers have 
come to the rescue of the demoralized host. As we 
looked, the great picture, with its crowd of human 
figures, absorbed us. We were no longer conscious 
of ruin, no longer conscious of the weeds in the 
outer courtyard, of the overthrown statue; we do 
not know, even to this day, if the picture had 
suffered any marring, any loss of color; through 
some magic it was for us as in the days it was ac- 
complished. As we stood and looked upon it so 
Moses must have looked in the days when the 
events it protrayed were fresh in the people's 
mind. 

Across the ruined outer court on the outer gate 
we found the rest of the story : Ramsie again in the 
battle; all the cities taken; the Egyptian camp and 
the camp life, where the artist, freed from con- 
ventional forms and symbolisms, has given his 
fancy play among the beasts released from their 
burdens. And last, by the entrance, sits Ramsie 
enthroned — ^the tracing slight yet beautiful. Those 
princes whom we beheld going the wrong way on 
the first gate, are approaching to congratulate 
their king. His face is proud and sad, his hand 
uplifted as he tells them: "It was indeed the more 
to my credit, but to your discredit, for you left me 
all alone ! " How human that reproach ! 

King Rameses! — we have gazed upon his very 
face in Cairo, not in painting, but "in the flesh," 



THE CITY OF THE KING 147 

and this father of Pharaoh's daughter is very real 
and hving to us — even as his pictures and inscrip- 
tions all reveal him, from the time when he vowed : 
"Men shall estimate the strength of the father in 
me his child;" to this single-handed battle in his 
own chariot, which fills us with living enthusiasm. 
Thebes is the city of Rameses. 

In the courts of his temple we are enlightened to 
further secrets of Egyptian art. Those figures of 
Osiris, in which the king personifies the god, lean 
against supporting pillars — they do not support the 
roof. Egyptians, though they had developed the 
column far beyond those early pillars at Beni- 
Hassan, never used the Caryatides. It is on the 
same principle that in modern Egyptian mosques 
the Saracens have not concealed the masonry of 
arches by ornamental designs, and could not have 
been guilty of making a wreath of flowers appear 
to support a heavy weight. 

Stirring and beautiful arc the whole series of 
decorations in Rameses' temple. There are other 
battles in which he is assisted by his sons; and in 
the library, the room inscribed "the sanctum of 
the soul, " is the tree of knowledge upon which that 
prenomen, User-maat-Ra-setep-en Ra, is being 
written. In this room are also the names of sons 
and daughters, and Bent-Anat receives queenly 
honors. It all makes clear to us another matter. 
We remember that in the tombs of the Old King- 
dom the guest chambers are decorated entirely 
with images of the earth-life. At Thebes we think 



148 OUT OF EGYPT 

at first that it is ideas alone which live in the tombs 
of the New Empire. But the tombs in the Valley 
of the Kings with their dreams of death, are only 
as the undecorated shaft and mummy-chamber 
of the tombs at Beni-Hassan and Sakkara. The 
temples on the western plain before the mountains, 
— on the other side of which the kings were buried 
— these temples are the royal guest chambers in 
which the earth-life is depicted, and the exploits 
of the kings commemorated in proportionately 
kingly fashion. That the arrangement is but the 
old plan magnified is evident from the fact that 
tombs of the nobility at Thebes are similar to those 
of ancient Memphis. It was the tombs of the 
nobility which we entered there — ^the kings had 
their Pyramids. 

So, in his ruined Ramesseum, Rameses' life, and 
the forces running through the life of Egypt, are 
revealed. 

Perhaps it is not generally realized that the great 
picture of Rameses' triumph in his Ramesseum 
had a hidden romanitc significance. In the result 
also of the battle of Kadesh, Rameses was the re- 
presentative of all Egypt, for he sealed the treaty 
with the Hittite Kheta by marrying the daughter 
of the Kheta King. Her father brought her to 
him and she was called in Egypt Ur-maat-neferu- 
Ra, the whole name signifying "Dawn.''* 

Womanhood in Egypt from the beginning re- 
ceived higher honor than in other countries of 
antiquity. Far back in the Ancient Kingdom a 

♦Petrie. 



THE CITY OF THE KING 149 

law was passed which was an advance upon the 
SaHc Law in Europe today; for it admitted women 
to reign in their own right. Women went about 
freely as the equals of men. The queen consort 
was sculptured beside the king. Descent was 
traced through the mother as well as through the 
father; and it is the mother who is pictured with 
her son in his tomb. Family life in Egypt presents 
many beautiful features. Woman had her place 
in mythology also. The Sun-myths which per- 
sonify the Sun and the Moon, or the Sun and the 
Earth, as a man and a woman, thus expressing the 
highest rhythm of the Universe, are evident in 
the Egyptian worship of the Moon-bride of the 
God-of-the-Sun. Temples were raised to her — 
Isis or Hathor — Goddess of Nature or Love, with 
the horns and the Moon for a crown. 

This marriage of Rameses, himself the "image 
of the Sun-god," stands for great things. 

A tablet in Abu-Simbel, containing what pur- 
ports to be a dialogue between Rameses and his 
favorite god, Ptah, thus rehearses the matter: 

Says Ptah:* "The people of Kheta are subjects 
of thy palace. I have placed it in their hearts to 
serve thee. . . . All their property is brought 
to thee. His eldest daughter stands forward at 
their head, to soften the heart of King Rameses 
II, — a great inconceivable wonder. She herself 
knew not the impression which her beauty made 
on thy heart. . . . Thou art the most com- 
plete example of strength and power. He is in- 
Brugich-Bey. 



150 OUT OF EGYPT 

conceivably great, who orders and does not obey. 
Since the times of the traditions of the gods, which 
are hidden in the house of the rolls of writing, from 
the times of the sun-god Ra (Re) down to thee, 
history had nothing to report about the Klieta 
people, but that they had one heart and one soul 
with Egypt." 

Rameses replies: "Thou has committed to me 
what thou hast created. I do and I will do again 
all good for thee, so long as I shall be sole king 
just as thou hast been. I have cared for the land, 
in order to create for thee a New Egypt, just as it 
existed in the old time. I have set up images of 
the gods according to thy likeness, yea, according 
to their color and form, which hold possession of 
Egypt." 

Of the daughters of Rameses we know the names 
of several, including Bent Anat, ("daughter of 
Anaitis"*) Meri-Amen, and Nebtaui. "A much 
younger sister named Meri, (Beloved) deserves to 
be mentioned, since her name reminds us of the 
princess Merris, the daughter of Maat-neferu Ra, 
the Kheta princess, who, according to Jewish tradi- 
tion, found Moses when she went to bathe, "f 

Strange if it were the little daughter of the 
Asiatic queen, who found Moses near the universi- 
ty city of On, the present Heliopolis, when the 
court was in the north, and who in the yearning of 
her woman's nature persuaded her father to let 
her keep the baby. Moses was probably educated 

*Anaitis is the name of a Syrian goddess. 
jBrugsch-Bey. 



THE CITY OF THE KING 151 

at Heliopolis in all the priestly lore of that peculi- 
arly religious city with its Eastern influence, but 
we may also imagine him brought with the king's 
sons to Thebes and trained in the University of 
Seti just beyond us. So possibly it is the school 
of Moses which we passed on our way to the 
Valley of the Kings and which we are still privileg- 
ed to walk through today. 

But the half Asiatic daughter of Rameses little 
knew that she was raising up a great leader of an 
Asiatic race, who should contend with her brother 
Merneptah — with whom he may have been educat- 
ed — and should break forever the bonds of that 
race in Egypt — nay, who should be the herald 
both of the Semitic supremacy in the world, which 
followed the Hamitic and preceded the Aryan; 
and of the second great development in human 
thought, the casting away of images and symbols. 

No man knows where Moses is buried. But, 
sitting on the base of a column in Rameses' great 
hall, we recall the empty tomb of Rameses' son 
Merneptah, and the close-wrapped body of that 
king, lying now in Cairo, so still, so eloquent of the 
passing of the Hamitic power. 

With this deeper significance in our minds, we 
returned to look once more at the picture of the 
great king, in his lonely triumph. His figure has 
become to us a symbol of something greater, un- 
locking for us the meaning of a world of other 
symbols. 

We who have seen the pictures cannot but re- 



152 OUT OF EGYPT 

joice this day that Rameses was left all alone; 
that in his victory, the most dramatic episode in 
Egyptian history, he might feel himself the in- 
carnation of all Egypt, — nay, in that fundamental 
virtue; supreme courage, the incarnation of divin- 
ity. That picture in the inner court of the temple 
is full of symbolism, some of which has become 
conscious and conventional, but in all of which, if 
we could but read, is the clue to Egyptian thought. 

The size of the king, like those heroes, half -God, 
haK-men, in the legends of all nations, is significant, 
a symbol of his might; still more significant, the 
evident belief of the king that he was divine. 

Symbolism is before language — it is the language 
of the Beginning and of that which is to be ful- 
filled. Egypt is the great example, the great 
country of it. It belongs to childhood and to the 
first stage of human development, and is nowhere 
seen as here. Always there is more in it than 
those who gave it utterance understood. 

But — as often since — ^the images or symbols 
which clothed God for the common people became 
so numerous that God, the Truth, was hidden by 
them — and then did Moses lead the Israelites 
from Egypt, and give that second commandment 
to the childhood of the human race, which we 
learn in our own childhood today. After Rameses, 
comes Moses; out of the form, the Truth. At Kar- 
nak, greatest temple of the world, they are digging 
up the images against which that commandment 
was made. 



THE CITY OF THE KING 15S 

Egypt, earnest and religious, with all the sym- 
bolism of the Beginning, held a conscious belief 
in one God in her priesthood. "O thou mighty 
One, of myriad forms and aspects, " says an Egyp- 
tian hymn. Abraham also had brought from 
Chaldea the idea of one God, and his descendants 
had dwelt in Egypt under Asiatic kings. When 
later, Moses, the baby of Egypt, the Hebrew found 
by Rameses' daughter among the reeds of the 
river, and still revered as a prophet on its banks, 
was brought up in the highest ranks of the Egyp- 
tians and educated in their priestly colleges, he 
added to his hereditary belief in one God, the 
knowledge, the expression, and the means of ex- 
pression, of the priesthood of Egypt. The He- 
brews were in a primitive and patriarchal stage 
compared with their civilized masters. 

It was at the height of Egypt's civilization that 
the Semitic Moses led his people out of Egypt; an 
event which seemed of no unusual import to the 
Egyptians. But is was not only a political move- 
ment, it was a rebellion against the forms of the 
old religion, a protest against the symbolic images 
with which the Egyptians clothed God for the 
people. 

The Semitic Hebrews, white-faced, white-robed, 
a chaste people, carried their pure white religion, 
the greatest blessing of the world, through all the 
vicissitudes of their little kingdoms of Israel and 
Judah; while Greece and Rome, with their great 
civilizations, but with mythologies lighter than 



154 OUT OF EGYPT 

that of Egypt, rose and declined. And again, 
just as Rome reached her golden age, the zenith 
of her glory, a Hebrew, Jesus, brought another 
reformation, of no moment to the world apparent- 
ly, scarce a thorn in the side of Rome at first, yet 
it heralded her end and the birth of Christianity. 
Christianity, grown out of Judaism, became the 
religion of fading Rome, and especially of her suc- 
cessor, the young Gothic civilization of Europe. 

Today we stand before the secrets of the earliest 
stage. Today the world reads the other side of 
the ancient storj^ 

Egypt speaks for the ancient Egyptians. Did 
the inhabitants have a premonition that the glory 
of the Hamitic race would fall when it clashed with 
the full sweep of the later-developed Semitic 
people .f^ We can understand the hopeless misun- 
derstanding between these alien races. But much 
that Israel brought from Mizraim has only been 
learned after three thousand years. The Hebrew 
writings told us that Moses was educated as a 
priest. Not until the last hundred years did 
scholars know that the name, "I am that I am," 
given him from the burning bush as authority for 
his message, was the Egyptian name for God. 



CHAPTER X 

Israel in Egypt 

WHAT is the story of Moses from 
Egyptian records? The relation of 
Palestine and Mizraim? 
Until a century or so ago Chris- 
tendom has seen the peoples of this age, — ^these 
Egyptians, Hittites, Balylonians, Chaldeans, Nin- 
evites — only from within the Hebrew position and 
point of view. Thus faintly reflected in our parti- 
san minds, they have seemed the monsters of an 
evil dream. 

Now we begin to know them from without the 
Hebrew consciousness — objectively — nay, more, 
we begin to find their centres and points of view. 
For the first time from the ancient world of West- 
ern Asia and Eastern Africa; from the dwellers and 
the travellers over lands and waters, mountains, 
valley routes and cities, the mists have rolled away. 
The romances of Thebes, Jerusalem, Nineveh and 
Babylon are real. 

Names have become words with meanings, in 
which, as we ponder maps of the ancient seats of 
the mighty, we read the story of the Past, the 
drama of the world. The peoples live again, the 
cities take on personalities, as do the gods who 

155 



156 OUT OF EGYPT 

represent the geniuses of the nations. In the plans 
at the back of our Bibles, which illustrate the 
Hebrew story, we may trace the campaigns of 
Egypt, reading Egypt under Palestine. 

By breaking up and combining the different 
histories, — Egypt's and Assyria's — with Israel's 
commentaries and political prophecies, what a 
vivid living history of those times we have! 

To begin with, Egypt was not aware of Israel. 
The first historic mention of that people occurs 
in the hymn of victory of Merneptih, Pharaoh of 
the Exodus, probably shortly before the tribe in 
Egypt went out. Petrie conjectures that this 
conquered tribe in Palestine were a branch of the 
family who had never gone down into Egypt, but 
remaining had kept up their earliest associations 
with localities. 

Back of the time of their leaving Egypt, the 
Hebrews in that country were to the Egyptians 
no more than one of many Semitic tribes, who for 
trade or as captives had for centuries filled Egypt. 
The Hebrew story stands clear cut, alone, without 
historical or geographical perspective, and with 
no need for such, since it is a psychic drama of 
human development to which the externals are 
mere accessories. But in Egypt it is only within 
the records of larger migrations that we trace the 
Hebrew story, finding it confirmed and illumined 
by the movements and conditions revealed. 

Of Abraham, the first Hebrew visitor, we have 
that late and elusory trace in the name, "Field of 




EGYPTIAN SUGAR CANE AND HUMBLE EGYPTIAN HOMES 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 157 

Abram, " among the places captured by Sheshonk 
from Rehoboam, and listed on the Karnak wall. 
Palestinian tradition in those days had evidently 
marked the spot. In the tomb of Khnumhotep at 
Beni-Hassan we saw that picture of a band of 
Semitic people, bringing gifts, which was hailed 
by its discoverers with enthusiasm, as probably 
depicting the entry of Joseph's brethren into 
Egypt. Known now to belong to a period long 
before Abraham, it portrays the entry of one of 
those patriarchal Bedouin "Princes of the Des- 
ert," as they were called, who drifted westward 
in a singular and apparently intuitive migration 
from Semitic Chaldea, and of whom Abraham — 
since his story tallies perfectly with their descrip- 
tion — was probably a late representative. 

The Hebrew story is typical. 

From the opening of history and before, the 
Semitic element, as we have seen, was always 
sifting into Egypt from the East, and through 
their blood as well as through their ideas, influenced 
more than we can measure the development of 
Egyptian thought. We are told that words of the 
Hebrew dialect are found in Egyptian records 
500 years before the Hebrew Scriptures could have 
been written. The Semitic language, as the langu- 
age in which intercourse with the other earliest 
nations had to be carried on, as also, a foreign 
language whose acquirement implied culture, be- 
came at the court of the Pharaohs of the Empire 
something like French at the courts of Western 
Europe. 



158 OUT OF EGYPT 

When we come to Joseph, his environment is 
clearer and explains him better. In reference to 
the Ishmaelites who sold him into Egypt, it may 
be recalled that the Arab race today consider 
themselves the descendants of Ishmael, and as- 
sert, though with bitterness, their relation to the 
Hebrews. 

In the long familiar Hebrew records of Egypt, 
we find the closest harmony with the details, now 
uncovered, of Egyptian life, at that period when 
the Hebrews were most closely connected with 
Egypt. There was that oflBce of vizier, the office 
of Prime Minister, who held Egypt in his hand for 
the Pharaoh, who regulated the economic affairs 
of the country to the smallest detail and the re- 
motest corner, fixing taxes and administering 
justice. The Hebrews out of Egypt, with time 
at last to look back, developed to a retrospective 
consciousness of their own story, saw Joseph in 
this office. The story conforms perfectly to Egyp- 
tian arrangements, for the Prime Minister stood 
next to the king, and was vested with the real 
power of the ruler. With a view to the future he 
was kept informed of conditions as well as of 
actual revenues. A day in the life of the Egyp- 
tian vizier would be an interesting chapter in the 
story of the state, and would fill in the Hebrew 
tale. 

We are told that each morning he appeared at 
the palace for an interview with the king. Coming 
out, he always met the treasurer at the entrance, 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 159 

and they exchanged reports. The taxes were not 
paid in money, but in produce and the granaries 
formed one of the chief departments of the treas- 
ury. After the conference the great man went on 
to open the court for the day, personally hearing 
cases and being informed of all business brought 
to his office. Here he received the reports of all 
the local administrators. 

There is a rank of birth and a rank of office, not 
necessarily coincident. An official who did well 
in his little local administration might hear the 
command to come up higher. At last, in the early 
days of the Empire, it had come to pass that what 
counted was not rank of birth but rank of office. 

In the story of Joseph's vicissitudes and rise to 
this position and power, we may see a similar 
development of Israelitish and Egyptian ideas — 
and an intimate knowledge of Egypt on the part 
of Israel. Joseph's adventure in the House of 
Potiphar was already written in slightly different 
guise in the Egyptian tale of the "Two Brothers." 
The story of the Chief Butler and the Chief Baker 
is illuminated by the Egyptian reports of a palace 
conspiracy at the end of the reign of Rameses III, 
after the Exodus, showing that royal butlers who 
participated in the affair, both as culprits and as 
judges, were important officers of the king's official 
household. 

Even the story of the seven years' famine and 
the king's dream, has a strange counterpart in 
Egypt. On a rock near the First Cataract is a 



160 OUT OF EGYPT 

story of a seven years' famine and a Pharaoh's 
dream, interpreted by his "great wise man," Im- 
hotep, a man whose name was never forgotten in 
Egypt. It is a late record, but purports to be 
carrying down the tradition of a period long cen- 
turies before Abraham. Seven year famines in 
Egypt have not been unknown, even in modern 
history. So, while we do not find in Egyptian 
records the name of the Hebrew hero, Joseph, 
these records throw light upon his surroundings, 
and show the Israelitish picture of conditions to 
be a true and faithful portraiture. 

For ages, but especially during the friendly 
Asiatic Hyksos dynasties just before the Empire, 
tribes of Semitic Bedoui, like Joseph's brethren, 
seeking pasture for their flocks, filtered into the 
rich Delta country, which the Hebrews, writing of 
it after the time of Rameses H, called the *'Land 
of Rameses. " He had left the strongest and most 
recent impress upon it for them, and they igno- 
rantly used this appellation, even when their 
stories went back to a time that knew no Rameses. 
They also, confirming the distance between the 
people and the king, seem scarcely conscious of 
the transition from this "Pharaoh of the Oppres- 
sion" to the "Pharaoh of the Exodus," since the 
Egyptian policy was continuous. The very er- 
rors of the Hebrew record, like flaws in a precious 
stone, reveal its genuineness. 

Having reached the time of Moses, we have 
arrived at the culmination of Egyptian glory. In 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 161 

the Jjebanon valley and about Galilee, near Caper- 
naum and Tabor — the "Dapur" of the Egyptians 
— over the sites of the later Hebrew occupation, 
Rameses II fought with the Hittites. After the 
conclusion of a treaty of peace between the two 
powers, there was no more fighting through the 
whole of his long reign. But the labor, as well as 
much of the wealth of Egypt had been brought in 
by continuous conquest. 

While native Egyptians filled the army, captive 
aliens did the hard, coarse work. Rameses II, the 
greatest builder of the Temple was hard put to it, 
not only for building funds and additional sources 
of temple revenue, but for the actual labor. It 
is believed that he impressed the Semitic aliens 
living in the land, and thus became the Pharaoh 
of the Oppression. The two treasure cities of 
Rameses and Pithom, which the Hebrew stories 
tell of as constructed by them, have within a few 
years been discovered, built of bricks of Nile mud, 
some of which bear Rameses' name. 

There was nothing yet to differentiate these 
people to history, nothing to show the mission for 
which history has since proved them chosen. 

From this time on, the history of Egypt, though 
past its power, has been most interesting to us. 
There cannot be a story until there are relations. 
At first it was Egypt alone, then merely conquest 
of the Idngdoms about her; at the last it was 
international politics. 

As to the actuality of the type character, Moses, 



162 OUT OF EGYPT 

we only know from Egyptian evidence that be- 
yond dispute, one at least of the tribes who com- 
bined to form the Israelitish nation, had gone 
down into Egypt and come out from thence, and 
that they niust have had a leader. Also, since they 
had been in Egypt, the land of writing, and with 
advanced civilization about them, it is inconceiv- 
able that their leader and probably others, had no 
knowledge of the art of writing. From this time 
on they appear to have kept their yearly records, 
as was the custom of the Egyptians — colored in 
the same way by the personal point of view, but, 
like those of their former masters, containing a 
stratum of historical fact. At least, Petrie sees 
no reason to doubt the gist of these historical 
documents any more than those of the Egyptians 
themselves. 

In taking up the details of Moses' life, we know 
from Egypt that the court of Rameses, contrary to 
that of his predecessors, was in the north, the 
Delta country, sometimes at that city of Helio- 
polis or On, where Hebrew tradition places the 
finding of Moses by Pharaoh's daughter. 

The place of Heliopolis was unique, as the seat 
of the worship of Re, the original god of the Sun- 
god worship in Egypt, the traditional originator 
of the Fifth Dynasty, and thereafter father of all 
the kings, either under his own name or that of 
Amon-Re. That the king might safely enter the 
Sanctuary at Heliopolis was, even as late as the 
time of Piankhi, the proof of divine origin, and 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 16S 

therefore right to rule.' J Thejpriesthood, often in 
rivahy with the state-priesthood of Amon at 
Thebes, were an older and more venerated sect, 
and their university also claimed superiority to all 
others in Egypt. The scholarship of Heliopolis 
was different from that of the rest of Egypt. It is 
more like the Asiatic Semitic culture, and seems, 
in some respects to prove a predynastic Semitic 
influence at this place. It was a theological 
centre, a holy city. Here Hebrew tradition finds 
Moses, and here also, a Christian tradition brings 
Mary and Joseph with the infant Jesus. The tree 
under which the story says they rested, — a syca- 
more, sacred in Egypt, — is still shown. 

The Hebrew statement that " Moses was learned 
in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" fits in especi- 
ally well, as we realize now, with their story of 
his adoption by the royal family; and is borne out 
by the similarity of Israelitish conceptions, temple 
forms and priestly orders, to those which Egypt 
now reveals. 

A commentary upon the necessity of Moses' 
flight from Egypt after killing the Egyptian, is the 
Egyptian horror of the murder of one of their 
number, in view of the importance they gave the 
after-fife. Therefore the strictness of their laws 
concerning this crime. 

Of the plagues we know nothing from Egypt, 
nothing from Merneptah's records. "His tomb 
was empty because he was drowned in crossing the 
Red Sea, " had said our good Mohammedan guide. 



164 OUT OF EGYPT 

But Merneptah was not drowned. This son of 
Rameses, named for his favorite god, was a dream- 
er, a lover of hterature, for whom the story of the 
"Two Brothers" was probably written when he 
was crown prince. His delicate face, as we know 
it in sculpture, is almost like a woman's. Rameses' 
first-born son and those who followed, including 
IQiamuas, him who was High-Priest of Ptah and 
the pride of his father's heart, died ere Rameses, 
almost a centenarian, went to his rest. Mernep- 
tah's reign, after the long strong reign of his 
father, was a troubled dream. From the north- 
west came an invasion, unprecedented from that 
quarter, which had previously been kept in whole- 
some fear by occasional advances from Egypt. 
This invasion is remarkable because of the identity 
of the allies who joined it, who were undoubtedly 
southern Europeans. 

These, therefore, step into history in the same 
reign as the Israelites. From which direction 
they came appears to open up the whole question 
of the origin of our Aryan race. Were they part 
of a great southward movement, which included 
the prehistoric Libyans themselves? This would 
agree with the theory of our Baltic origin, and with 
the southward changes of historic times, which 
certainly mixed Aryan blood with the Libyan 
stock. Or, did they come from Northern Africa, 
west of Egypt, and later migrate northward to 
Europe? This would give us the African origin. 
Either explanation followed to its extreme makes 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 165 

us more closely related with the Libyan Kabyles 
who are brothers to the Egyptians, past and 
present, — ^than has generally been supposed; since 
these have long been classified as Hamitic peoples. 
Though we have elsewhere spoken of the Egyp- 
tians as "Oriental" it was only in their present 
religion and mode of life. According to the earliest 
theories, all the white migrations came from Asia; 
and as for the religious instinct, we find it funda- 
mental in all humanity. The great distinction 
between East and West has always lain in the 
psychic interests and development of the one; and 
the scientific and material development of the 
other. To the West, the form has always been 
the first necessity, — there must be a body, even 
for the resurrection. Egypt conforms perfectly 
to this Western distinction. And not only is the 
development of Western civilization continuous 
from Egypt to present Europe and America, in 
science and material symbols; but the race which, 
in Egypt, reached and passed its culminating cul- 
ture, before the development of any other people, 
appears to be that same Iberian or Berber race, 
which has left its monuments and obelisks in 
Europe, and which, — whatever its migrations, 
underlies all Europe and Northern Africa. Be- 
cause it thus seems to be the foundation of Europe 
in every way, we can hardly speak of it as "Orien- 
tal," but we may call it "Hamitic" — though the 
strong lines drawn by earlier scholars upon the 
Hebrew Genesis, seem to grow faint as research 



166 OUT OF EGYPT 

progresses. The savants are not yet agreed among 
themselves, and we must wait.* 

In Merneptahs time the Delta was overrun and 
devastated. Merneptah's defence must have been 
strong, for he was splendidly victorious. But he 
was an old man, and this makes it easy to under- 
stand his dealings with Moses — on the one hand 
his fear, on the other, his eagerness to hold the 
valuable bondsmen. 

The route of the Israehtes out of the country, 
and the parting of the waters is now understand- 
able. There was a hne of forts running north and 
south across the eastern approach to the Delta. 
In the reports of frontier officials we read of a 
Semitic tribe passed into the country only a few 
years prior to the Exodus; and in the reign which 
probably followed the event, is the record of the 
pursuit of some fugitive slaves over the frontier. 
The Israelites were afraid of being stopped at the 
forts and accordingly turned far south. 

In those days were lakes, north of the Red Sea, 
which at flood tide and under certain winds, were 
connected with it. Was the tide more than ordi- 
narily low and the wind favorable, when the 

*Everywhere in Europe and among the Kabyles, the Berber is 
mixed with the Aryan stock today. But the pure stock of the first 
white race, which in Europe is supposed to have followed the yellow 
— from which it might seem to have retained its ancestor-worship — 
is brown-complexioned or even dark in color. A dark skin does not 
necessarily make a black man, as we admit in the relation between 
the Hindoo and the European Aryan. Structural affinities permit 
more scientific classifications. Nevertheless, these historic dis- 
coveries reveal to us not only the continuity, but the unity of 
human life. 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 167 

Israelites, light of burdens, light of heart in their 
belief, passed over "between two walls of water?" 
And when Pharaoh's heavy chariots tried to fol- 
low and sank in the loose sand, the flood tide 
which caught them, following an ebb so low, 
would naturally have been unusually high. Some 
troops may have been lost. The Egyptians do 
not record their failures. 

In the desert beyond the Mokattam hills, is a 
split in the stone stratum, which forms an ancient 
well, now popularly associated with this story as 
the place where Moses' rod brought water from 
the rock. At least the story is typical of the great 
need of Egypt and the East through all the ages, 
the need for water, which these long-time inhabi- 
tants of the Delta, now faced for the first time. 
Was there anything unusual about the finding of 
the water? Who can deny? To be able to find a 
place where men might dig a well for a caravan 
route, was one of the most fundamental gifts in 
ancient Egyptain days, and seems to have per- 
tained especially to royalty. It is today asserted 
in the East that a sixth sense exists in some per- 
sons, whereby through the feeling of a twig in the 
hand, they can divine where water may be found — 
and Moses must have been in a condition of in- 
tense exaltation. Science, by which we have 
denied as fairy tales the simple stories of child- 
like peoples, may in time lead us to understand and 
be ashamed. We have not reached the end. 

The difficulties the Hebrew leader found are 



168 OUT OF EGYPT 

now shown to be only too evidently the natural 
outcome of the age and situation. In the Delta 
country Ptah had been worshipped in the form of 
a bull. The masses of the people could not be 
held to the height of their leader's conception of 
God, and the mission he evidently foresaw for 
them. They, like the masses always and every- 
where, sought for a tangible and definite form; 
and when Moses left them to commune with the 
Most High, they hurriedly made for themselves a 
calf of gold! There were many times of discon- 
tent, of lack of faith, of longing for the security of 
their work, of which they promptly forgot the pain. 

In the plan of the tabernacle and the later 
temple, we see clearly a form belonging to Egypt — 
and also to Assyria — perhaps in all these cases the 
result of a combination of the outer influences of 
these nations upon one another, and the inner 
intuitive development of all. 

The first ten laws of the Hebrew people, the 
basis of all that followed, were engraved on tables 
of stone which would correspond to the Egyp- 
tian stelse — such as that of the great lawgiver, 
Harmhab, of some hundred and fifty years before. 
We see how the first two commandments, em- 
bodying the idea of the exclusiveness of God, 
and doing away with images, w^ere necessary for 
the development and preservation of the great 
idea of Spirit, which was the Hebrew's mission; 
and for which their own leading out of Egypt, and 
their seclusion were also a necessity, if they were 
to give light to the world. 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 169 

After that long wandering in the desert, in 
which they were purified, gradually losing the 
most limiting influences of Egypt, the new genera- 
tion came to their own and to national union. In 
the effort to establish themselves we find them in 
collision with those peoples whom we have learned 
to know: the old and mysterious power of the 
Hittites, already waning; the buffer state of the 
Amorites, between Palestine and Syria, long the 
boundary between the Hittite and Egyptian 
powers; and lastly, the new Phihstines. The Phil- 
istines appear to be late comers in Asia, also mov- 
ing south. Their own pottery and the Egyptian 
description of them as a "people of the sea," 
harmonize with the Hebrew tradition that they 
came from Crete, — the true meaning of the He- 
brew name "Caphtor." Were they, as has been 
suggested, Europeans, part of a southward move- 
ment, overlapping and submerging the preceding 
wave of the Hittites.? 

Just previous to the entrance of Israel into 
Palestine, the Philistines appear to have pushed 
south, smiting and breaking up the Hittite con- 
federation, whose strength had already departed, 
and crowding a fragment of these, with the Amor- 
ites, whom they also defeated and displaced, down 
into Palestine, where they all together barred the 
Hebrews' way. But the Hebrews were a young 
generation, and nationally also in the youthful 
period of conquest which precedes secure estab- 
lishment. Gradually they made their way into 



170 OUT OF EGYPT 

the country and settled there. But straight 
across the aheady historic plain of Megiddo, from 
the Jordan to the sea, the PhiHstines built a line 
of cities cutting the Hebrew tribes in two. It 
almost prevented the Hebrews from acquiring the 
strength of union and a national existence, and 
nearly made a Philistinian conquest of them. 

However, we know that the Philistines did not 
crush the Hebrews. The latter achieved their 
union and their kingship under Saul and David, 
and smote their powerful neighbors. In Israel, 
as in Egypt in the glorious days of Empire, the 
citizens were soldiers; the stranger within the 
gate was called upon to work. Then, as always 
after conquest, came the period of prosperity and 
glory, and the building of the Temple. The 
"House of Yahveh" or Jehovah, the Israelites 
called it, as the Egyptians called it the "House 
of Amon," or "Ptah." "The Palace is not for 
man, but for the Lord God, " says David the King. 
And we remember how the Egyptians built of 
stone their temples to the Everlasting, while their 
own ephemeral palaces were often of brick and 
wood. 

The temple was the visible form to contain 
their ideal, the sign to suggest it. But the Hebrew 
conception had come out from the others and was 
high. 

Solomon, from the fulness of his heart, exclaims, 
"Great is our God above all Gods! Who is able 
to build him an house, seeing the heaven, and the 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 171 

heaven of heavens, cannot contain him? Who am 
I then, that I should build him an house, save 
only to burn sacrifice before him?" 

However, to the intuitional mind of Samuel, 
Jehovah had said of David: 

"He shall build me an house, and I will estab- 
lish his throne," and the heart of David in the 
silence, had responded. The establishment of the 
national government and of the national ideal 
were almost coincident. 

In the same way, we find each king in Egypt 
building on the "National Sanctuary." 

But David, as a man of conquest, was not per- 
mitted to actually build the Temple of Jehovah in 
Jerusalem, though he might plan for it. During 
his reign, he appointed with impressive ceremonies, 
the crown prince, Solomon, as the crown princes 
were appointed in Egypt; but this inauguration 
announced a special mission, the building of the 
Temple. David the King, said to the people: 

"He (Jehovah) hath chosen Solomon, my son, 
to sit upon the throne of the kingdom of the Lord 
over Israel." 

Israel's kingdom, too, was the domain of Israel's 
God; but Israel's God alone, did not fall with 
Israel. 

To David and Samuel, so simple, so childlike, 
might well have come Divine intuitions. The 
king feels that the Lord gave him the plan of the 
Temple — whether as a forgotten recollection out 
of Egypt, or by a similar subjective development. 



1112 OUT OF EGYPT 

can we say? David, like the Pharaohs, headed 
the gifts to his God. Gold and silver, brass and 
iron and precious stones — ^the wealth dedicated 
to the Temple was his offering to the Lord. Not 
yet had come the realization to the human con- 
sciousness; "He that giveth to the poor, lendeth 
to the Lord." Nevertheless, as Jesus showed in 
reference to the box of precious ointment, our own 
development demands that we look up and do 
homage to that which is greater than ourselves. 

The satisfaction of building churches, even 
today, supphes a need which cannot be ignored, 
which opens our hearts to something higher than 
food and drink and even man. It has been the 
keynote of history, this need of the spirit to ex- 
press the emotion of reverence, to turn to a known 
or "unknown God," a Creative Spirit which up- 
holds it. So may we sometime realize that exalted 
conception of humanity, "Ye are the Temple." 

When the acts of David were finished, and 
written, "with all his reign and his might, and 
the times that went over him, and over Israel, 
and over all the kingdoms of the countries," 
Soloman sat upon the throne of his father. 

And now we find a great spirit of brotherliness 
between Solomon of Jerusalem, and Hiram of 
Tyre; and Hiram sends for the Temple of Solomon's 
God, skilled workmen, and the cedar of Lebanon, 
which for so many centuries had gone as a gift 
to the Temple of Amon at Thebes. 

The national Temple at Jerusalem was built 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 173 

with the great outer court, beyond which was the 
"holy place for the people," corresponding to the 
hypostyle hall, and behind this, the "holy of 
holies." The walls were overlaid with silver and 
gold. There were two pillars before the building, 
in place of the two obelisks of Egypt. There was 
no holy lake, but there was the font in the court. 
The symbol of purification is a world symbol. 
There was the altar for sacrifice in the outer 
court, and there were gold and silver vessels for 
the service of incense. On a table in the holy 
place, was the shew bread, left in the Temple, 
much as Egyptian offerings were left, but with 
more consciousness of a symbolic significance. 
Today we have the Table of the Lord, in that most 
spiritual conception of the Last Supper in the 
Christian Church. 

But the one all important difference between 
Egypt's temples and Jerusalem's, was the fact 
that here in the sanctuary was no image of God. 
The Hebrews reahzed that God, as Spirit, is not 
a material form. 

In the midst of all the forms about them, we 
realize as never before, how great was Israel's 
formless Idea. The highest conception of truth 
in Egypt had been Ikhnaton's literal representa- 
tion of the objective world, which after all, is but 
relative truth; Israel saw inner righteousness, pro- 
gress toward Spirit. How amazing the smallness 
of Israel, the greatness of her mission! "Thy 
people, whom thou hast redeemed out of Egypt. " 



174 OUT OF EGYPT 

Little Palestine — ^redeemed out of, but protected 
by Egypt ! Thus only, could she rise secure among 
the powers warring for conquest around her. 

For in the days of Israel's national flowering, 
when the national character and the national ideal 
became estabHshed in the state and in the temple, 
Sheshonk, reviving Egypt, which no longer con- 
trolled the Syrian countries, was Solomon's friend 
and apparently his suzerain in a protective alli- 
ance. Sheshonk's daughter became Solomon's 
wife, whom, as the Hebrews quaintly remark, 
Solomon felt it necessary to remove from the Holy 
City of Jerusalem when the Temple was built, 
and whom he accordingly lodged in a fair palace 
at a distance. 

Alas, Israel, having perfected her Idea, quickly 
passed into a period of decadence. She lost her 
pure conception — ^following after the strange gods 
of the races mingling with her own. "Because 
thou hast barkened unto these" — ^threatened the 
despairing prophets. From this time was the 
nation divided — and Sheshonk sided against Solo- 
mon's son. Egypt still compelled for a time the 
allegiance of Palestine, asserting her authority and 
securing the tribute by occasionally making kings 
— seating a younger brother in an elder's place. 
But the greatness of Egypt was now itself forever 
past — and had become among the nations a dan- 
gerous memory. It was but the deluding sem- 
blance of itself, the trust in which meant sure 
disaster. 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 175 

Assyria and Babylon were to gather the flower 
of Israel — but not at once. As Assyria's power 
grew large in the East, and she gradually included 
those marginal nations, the possession of which 
meant Empire, the Hebrew kingdoms, with the 
others, submitted. But again and again, in her 
own struggle to escape destruction, Egypt, through 
envoys, stirred the Syrian states to revolt. 

Israel and Judah, through all their existence, 
had always a hankering for the fleshpots of Egypt. 
Remembrance of Egypt's greatness was bred into 
them as into no other of the nations — ^the others 
had merely felt Egypt's chastisements. The He- 
brews, after their own emulation of greatness, for- 
getting their former hardships, due to Egypt's 
power, and eager for friendship with the nation to 
which they had once appeared contemptible, look- 
ed back with longing admiration. Israel, listen- 
ing to the voice of Pharaoh, revolted with the 
other Syrian kingdoms and met deadly punish- 
ment. For the Pharaoh's auxiharies sent in aid 
of the alliance were swept away by the Assyrians, 
and the Ten Tribes carried into a captivity from 
which they never returned. (722 B. C.) After 
that, Judah held steady for a time. The new 
Ethiopian Pharaoh again attempted to stir up 
trouble, the Egyptian party in Judah waxed 
strong. It was then that the prophet Isaiah 
uttered his immortal protests and held Hezekiah 
faithful to Assyria. 

"Woe to the rebellious children," cried Isaiah in 



176 OUT OF EGYPT 

the time of Hezekiah, "that walk to go down into 
Egypt ... to strengthen themselves in the 
strength of the Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow 
of Egypt! 

"Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be 
your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt 
your confusion. "* 

Shortly after, Babylon arose within the Assyr- 
ian domain, and again made trouble among the 
small states. Judah and Egypt joined the alli- 
ance against Assyria. This was the occasion of 
that vengeful visit of Sennacherib, when Phoenicia 
and Syria fell, when under Taharka the full Egyp- 
tian army, meeting for the first time the Assyrian, 
was completely defeated, and Jerusalem was scorn- 
fully invested, — the ambassadors of Sennacherib 
uttering those taunts concerning dependence on 
Egypt, that "reed, upon which, if a man lean, it 
will pierce his hand." But Hezekiah was not 
leaning on the reed, he had long turned his heart 
to the God of the prophet; and when Sennacherib, 
having conquered Egypt, brought up his army 
and renewed his taunts by letter, Hezekiah spread 
the letter in the Temple. Sennacherib's great 
army was smitten by malarial winds from the 
Delta, to which they were unaccustomed. And 
this dire disaster, together with news from Baby- 
lon, caused Sennacherib unceremoniously to de- 
part. The deliverance of this one little city was 
remarkable, even from an outside point of view. 
*IsaiahXXX. 1:3. 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 177 

Such were the world poHtics of 700 B. C, 
roughly divided between the nations who took 
sides with the one or the other of the two first 
class powers, the one already broken, the other, 
just coming to its strength. Babylon, in alliance 
with what became the later kingdom of the Medes 
and Persians, was just rising. 

By three generations, Judah, in spite of the des- 
pairing efforts of the prophets, had fallen com- 
pletely from her pure conception and had lost all 
her strength. 

In Egypt the last Restoration had begun with 
the last strong dynasty. Pharaoh Necho re-as- 
serted Egyptian authority over the Syro-Palestin- 
ian nations, and for a time all went well. Then 
appeared Nebuchadnezzer, King of Babylon, and 
wrested away the Empire. Presently Judah re- 
belled against him. "But the King of Egypt 
came not again out of his land; for the King of 
Babylon had taken from the river of Egypt unto 
the river Euphrates all that pertained to the King 
of Egypt."* Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusa- 
lem, carried away a portion of the people with the 
king, and placed the king's uncle, whom he called 
Zedekiah, on the throne. But Zedekiah, nothing 
heeding of the lesson, nor of the sovereign under 
whom he held his throne, also "rebelled against 
the King of Babylon." Then came Nebuchad- 
nezzar the third time. In vain did the prophet 
Jeremiah protest and plead that the king and the 

*2 King, 24: 7. 



178 OUT OF EGYPT 

princes would go out to the Babylonian ruler, and 
all would be well. For a time the king shut him 
up in prison to keep him from weakening their 
army. Finally, unable to stifle his voice, the 
princes threw him, as a bird of ill omen, into a 
mud dungeon in the prison. The king, with fear 
in his heart, secretly rescued him, secretly listen- 
ed again to his prophecies; but, unable to oppose 
the leaders of his people, pursued their policy, 
to the utter destruction of Jerusalem and of the 
temple which had stood 400 years. The gold 
and silver and brass were carried away for the 
Temple in Babylon. Of the people, a small 
remnant, chiefly of the poor, were left to till the 
ground and dress the vines; and a governor was 
placed over them. Jeremiah also was left behind, 
and poured out his "Lamentations" over the 
ruined city. Then again, that Egyptian party, 
failing to realize that it was their own political 
error, which was at least the secondary cause of 
their disasters at the hands of the Eastern Em- 
pires, insisted upon leaving Jerusalem altogether, 
and going down into Egypt to find safety in that 
country. They carried with them Jeremiah, still 
violently protesting, and he perished there. 

Today, in surveying the whole story, we have 
understood the violence of despair of Isaiah and 
Jeremiah at the strength of the Egyptian party 
whose rebellion wrecked Israel; we have measured 
to some extent the danger against which Hezekiah 
prayed when he spread Sennacherib's letter be- 
fore the Lord in the Temple. 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 179 

With the story connected and illuminated, we 
can feel a human interest in the action or the wait- 
ing suspense of these human beings through each 
incident. And following the international politics 
of those days, we understand Israel in the hght 
of Egypt's records, Israel's God in the light of 
Egypt's gods. 

We can see so well how it was in those days of 
intense subjective feeling, and of distorted outer 
knowledge — ^how necessary for the prophets to, 
use such language to hold Israel from Egypt; how, 
in order to preserve and to develop their majestic 
conception of God, the God of Israel, it was neces- 
sary that they should not recognize that God in 
any images or forms. 

What partisans we who read only the Bible, 
have been — and with reason! For those who 
today read the words of the inspiration of the 
prophets only from within the prophet's point 
of view, perhaps come nearest, after all, to the 
true feeling, and therefore to the true appreciation 
of them. 

One of Prof. Petrie's recent discoveries in Egypt 
was a very perfect Jewish temple, perhaps of the 
time of Jeremiah. On the Island of Elephantine 
there was found about four years ago, by the Berlin 
Papyrus Commission and edited by Prof. Sachau, 
a great quantity of papyri in Aramaic, the dialect 
in which Nehemiah, Ezra and Daniel were written, 
the popular tongue which Jesus spoke, Hebrew 
being only employed as a ritual language by 



180 OUT OF EGYPT 

learned men. These Jewish documents belong to 
the Persian era, but as two of the Jewish military 
divisions which they describe bore Babylonian 
standards, that fact, together with other strong 
evidence, proves that here was an earlier Jewish 
colony, added to by those who came down into 
Egypt at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. 
Though they retained the name of Jehovah (Yah- 
veh) as their national God, they did not see him 
as universal, and mingled his name with that of 
other deities. But their temple was to Jehovah. 

We recall how Isaiah's prophecy of Egypt's 
decadence had been fulfilled in detail: "I will set 
the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they 
shall fight everyone against his brother, and every- 
one against his neighbor; city against city, and 
kingdom against kingdom." We know now how 
truly this had come to pass. 

And Isaiah had said also: *'In that day shall 
there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the 
land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof 
to the Lord." 

(Here at the Island of Elephantine was the 
"border" of Egypt for many centuries.) 

"And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto 
the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt," had con- 
tinued Isaiah — "he shall send them a saviour and 
a great one, and he shall deliver them. 

"And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and 
the Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day." 

When the Babylonian Empire succumbed to 



ISRAEL IN EGYPT 181 

the Persian, the Jews were released from the 
Babylonian captivity. It is interesting to notice 
the Hebrew story of Daniel's interpreting the 
king's dream in Babylon, as Joseph, perhaps a 
millenium earlier, had done in Egypt. Hebrews 
would seem several times to have been trained at 
court, at the two great centres of the ancient 
world. 

The new Persian Power was very favorable to 
the Jews. Cyrus sent back a portion of those who 
had endured the Babylonian captivity, to Jeru- 
salem to rebuild the city and the Temple. There 
in chastened spirit they renewed their ideal; there 
they made ready to give their supreme message 
to the world. The Persian Empire was wisely 
welded. Egypt herself became no more than a 
portion of it, conquered by Cambyses. 

As the Persians had encouraged the rebuilding 
of the Temple in Jerusalem, so they spared the 
Jewish temple in Egypt, and allowed the Egypti- 
an Jews to keep their Passover in the month of 
Nisan — the first month of the civil year, as adopted 
from Babylon. 

This, then, is the story of the Old Testament 
relations of Israel to Egypt. 

We know that the subjective revelation which 
has come down to us dawned first in the East, in 
Asia, from whence came Abraham, the land which 
the Egyptians, perhaps unconscious of the reason 
why, called the "God-land. " But Egypt had her 
own early vision and drew upon the East, giving 
her ideas form. 



182 OUT OF EGYPT 

And Israel for the pure idea of Spirit broke 
through the form. 

Our broader stories, while they explain Israel, 
make her more wonderful and living. Lebanon 
has a new meaning for us, and the deeper meaning 
of little Palestine in the Jordan Valley is revealed. 

It was a chosen country for the religion of the 
future to come out of, the key to the world, with 
Egypt on one side and Assyria-Babylon on the 
other; drawing upon both at first, and then the 
battle-ground of both; fed by the two great rivers 
of civilization, the Nile and the Tigro-Euphrates, 
until it became the meeting-place of the waters, 
and was submerged. 

But its message was carried. In our objective, 
self-conscious, scientific knowledge of today we 
can see how the Spirit, subjectively known, was 
being revealed through it all. The East prepared 
the message for the West, even as the West pre- 
pared the form for the East. 

As Isaiah triumphantly concluded: 

"In that day shall Israel be the third with 
Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the 
midst of the land: 

"Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying. 
Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work 
of mv hands, and Israel, mine inheritance." 



CHAPTER XI 

The Evening and the Morning 

AN English scholar, versed in sacred 
nomenclature, has stated that the very 
name of Israel is made up of three 
principles : Re, the masculine and mate- 
rial, signifying Egypt, as personified in Egypt's 
chief god; Is, the feminine psychic element, stand- 
ing for the goddess, who was the chief deity of 
Assyria; and El, the general principle. 

To the Greeks, whose poetry was so sublime 
that it took form in gods and goddrsses, the Soul 
was feminine, was Psyche. 

The West, from Egypt to the present day, has 
developed material science, has been conscious of 
the form, as expressed in that olf Egyptian hymn, 
"O Form, One." But the East has given religion 
to the world. And even as the masculine is at- 
tracted by the feminine, the West has always felt 
the fascination of the East, since the time of Abra- 
ham, when the Egyptians saw that Sara was 
"very fair." 

We have observed how, in the mythology of 
Egypt, the Moonbride of the God of the Sun, ex- 
pressed with him the supreme rhythm of the Uni- 

183 



184 OUT OF EGYPT 

verse, in the figures of a man and a woman. She 
was Isis, or Hathor or Unit-Goddess of Nature or 
Love. 

Rameses II, Son of Re, and image of the Sun-god, 
representative of all Egypt, married a princess 
who, as the seal of her father's treaty, stood for 
her people; and this marriage symbolized the 
union of the first two great nations. She was the 
princess whom the Egyptians called "Dawn." 

We are inclined to think that because of its very 
masculinity, the West has ever since enthroned 
womanhood. 

It was the daughter of this princess who is tradi- 
tionally supposed to have found Moses, the spirit 
which broke through the form of Egypt, and 
heralded the fall of the Hamitic and the rise of the 
Semitic power. 

But to understand all that the form has meant, 
we must look to the end as well as to the beginning 
of the Egyptian story. 

Just before the Persian era there had come to 
Egypt, as we have mentioned, a curious Restora- 
tion. The Assyrians had not been able to hold 
the land. They were strugghng against Baby- 
lonia, rising again to supremacy within their own 
borders, and against the new Persia or Elam, still 
further East. Then Egypt quietly dropped away 
and was gathered into the hand of Psamtik, the 
Libyan, Prince of Sais. He had dreamed of a 
reunited Egypt, and the dream belonged to his 
line. Internal change had always been working 



EVENING AND THE MORNING 185 

and Libyan generals of Libyan troops, hired in 
the time of Rameses III, when the temple was 
absorbing the state, had risen to strength and 
importance. The city of Sais, often re-inforced, 
appears to have been the centre of Libyan in- 
fluence and possibly the seat of a Libyan king, in 
pre-dynastic days. 

By the aid of Greek mercenaries who frequented 
the Delta ports, Psamtik overcame the prejudices 
of his rivals; and before all his purpose was fully 
evident to the world outside, Egypt revived again 
in the strength of union. 

Egypt revived, but her strength was no longer 
from within. She was held together and main- 
tained against the world by aliens. The state 
was a more or less artificial organization; for a 
large body of the army were Greeks, naturally 
much favored by the Pharaoh, since they brought 
him his throne and maintained it for him. To a 
certain extent, the state will be what its army is. 

This Restoration was not a new dawn, but an 
after-glow; the sunset went back to the dawn which 
had been. With the element of force drawn from 
without, the purely Egyptian influence was alto- 
gether priestly. While Psamtik and the power of 
the state reach out toward the modern world which 
is now above the northern horizon, entering into 
friendly contests of inter-comnmnication in com- 
merce, with its international policies and protec- 
tions, the Egyptian retires to the remotest begin- 
ning, when Egypt knew no world outside of the 



186 OUT OF EGYPT 

Nile Valley. Still Egypt was made by and divided 
between the army and the religious orders. 

The Egyptian went his own way — ^in the temples. 
From his Hmited position, he could not see the 
economic and political use of the Greeks, who had 
become necessary to the state and indirectly to his 
welfare. For the government of Egypt had never 
grown from out the people; they were lost in 
miserable chaos and mutual destruction, as the 
undeveloped classes of all ages must be, unless 
held by a strong ruler, or a government of able re- 
presentatives ruling in accord with law, when they 
live and work in peace. The necessary fighting 
was now done for the native inhabitants by these 
foreigners. Yet, so far as Egypt's individual 
existence was concerned, the priests and the 
Egyptian party of those days were right. They 
had lost hold of their birthright. When the power 
which held Egypt together was alien, Egypt not 
only ceased to be Egypt for the Egyptians — it 
ceased to be a true and independent state. That 
Egypt had perished long ago — with Amon — in 
the feudal conditions of vassalage, which preceded 
the Restoration. 

Yet the Restoration accomplished, unconscious- 
ly to itself, as all greatest things are done, an 
invaluable purpose. The real Egypt had worked 
out the beginnings of objective knowledge and 
seK-consciousness, and had wrought them into 
stone. But this earliest of all nations was the 
most conservative. The Egypt of the Restora- 



EVENING AND THE MORNING 187 

tion was the mediator between the old and the 
new; the interpreter of Egypt to the world, as 
Breasted's History makes clear to us. In this way 
the ancient conservative Egypt became the teach- 
er of the infant states of Europe. 

Before the day of Psamtik, Egypt had been 
like Europe in the Middle Ages, a system of vas- 
salage. And now, with more stable government, 
the scholastic period set in. After all, though the 
force was imported from without, it was still the 
priests who gave the form to the state. They 
alone, in their temple fastnesses, had conserved an 
ideal which had blossomed into the Restoration. 
It was not a vision of the Empire. That was too 
near, — they thought they knew the faults which 
wrought its downfall. But they dreamed that 
the state, as it emerged in the beginning, had been 
perfect. If the forms could be brought back, the 
same inner-world which once gave hfe to them 
would exist again. (How should they know that 
the classic age is always that preceding the settling 
of the state!) 

But the first great difficulty lay in the fact that 
the language of Egypt, during three thousand 
years, had naturally developed. Old Egyptian 
must have been more difficult to the man of Psam- 
tik's time than Old English is to us. Much of the 
symbolic character of the early picture-writing 
had become obscured. It was this obscurity 
which increased the fascination of Egypt's mystery 
to the Greeks. Yet the old hieroglyphics con- 



188 OUT OF EGYPT 

tained all that the Egyptians must know to reform 
Egypt. 

Accordingly the ancient language became sacred, 
and the first instruction the youth received in the 
schools, which of course belonged to the priest- 
hoods, was to read and write the ancient script. 
Culture became the study of what had been long 
left lifeless. The old religious texts were copied 
for us. Some the scribes did not then understand, 
but the scholars of today who read the copies, 
know and correct the mis-reading of twenty-five 
hundred years nearer the date of the originals. 

Though the officials, who proudly bore all the 
most ancient titles of Egypt, often could not un- 
derstand the ancient language, yet whatever the 
affair of the present, the deciding word came by 
way of the priests from a past at least two millen- 
iums old.* 

More conventional than conventions established 
in the beginning were the forms and the organiza- 
tion of the Egypt of Psamtik's day, because they 
did not spring directly from new life. In the 
religious phase of the Restoration we find formal- 
ism carried to that excess which tends to its own 
destruction. Animal worship now became fanati- 
cal. And the exact observance of the form of 
ceremonial purity goes back to the standard of 
the Old Kingdom before the ethics connected with 
the Osiris myth had developed. It is the same 
sort of ceremonial observance which Jesus later 

* Breasted. 



EVENING AND THE MORNING 189 

found in the Hebrew Restoration and which he so 
strongly condemned. 

But the presence of hfe in Egypt was still re- 
vealed. The Egyptians were always artists, for 
was it not they who first expressed their thought 
in form? Out of the very ordered condition of 
things, Egyptian art alone now sprang with new 
freedom to one supreme last flowering. 

Altogether, with its impressive organization, its 
old customs and its new art, this was a most 
favorable period for the Greek to grow in Egypt. 
The time approached the classic age in Europe. 
And Greece had decayed before Egypt passed 
away — nay, Egypt, the beginning, has not yet 
passed away. 

Apries, Pharaoh of Psamtik's line, the "Hophra" 
of the Hebrew records, whose great palace at 
Memphis Petrie has just been unearthed, stirred up 
revolt among that unfortunate little group of 
states, which was usually the margin of one Empire 
or the other. 

But his own native Egyptian soldiers rebelled 
against him, because of his dependence on the 
Greeks. And when his general, Ahmose, the 
"Amasis" of the Greeks, the last usurper and 
law-giver, — ^for the two go together in Egypt, — 
gained the throne by the aid of the native troops, 
he restricted the Greeks to Naucratis, where, 
though no longer permitted quarters in other 
cities, they now had their own. Naucratis became 
the place of the unity of Greece — such unity as 



190 OUT OF EGYPT 

the Greeks never knew in their own country. Here 
men from Athens, Sparta and the Islands beyond 
the Seas, erected a common temple.* 

The Greeks now take up the story of Egypt, 
and from this point on, as if the Providence work- 
ing through the human race had planned it so, 
the monuments of this period, less needed than 
those of a former time, have perished utterly. 

The Greek's reverence for the impenetrable 
mystery of Egypt was profound. Light-hearted 
and volatile as he was, he scarcely knew what to 
make of the solemn and mystic Egyptian, and 
stood in awe of him; though he might ridicule at 
home the peculiarities of degenerate Egyptian 
forms of worship. He was in living contact with 
the things of a civilization, older then than any 
with which we may come into intimate touch 
today. It was a life, further in age from his own, 
than any we can know. If the wonder of the 
great buildings impresses our civilization, so 
developed in mechanics, how must these buildings, 
in their perfection, have impressed the imagina- 
tion of the early Greek! It was back of his be- 
ginning. Altho' it is further from us, we under- 
stand it better. 

The Greek never read the Egyptian's heart, nor 
even perfectly his written records, and accepted 
his story second-hand. f Our age has gone back 
to read the earliest writings. Neither did the 

♦This is the period dealt with in Ebers' "Egyptian Prmcess." 
fAs we know by comparisons. 



EVENING AND THE MORNING 191 

Greek know the mysterious significance of the 
temple construction, yet he dreamed a truth be- 
hind the veil. 

The Greeks found in the buildings, not only 
forms, but ideas, and added their own particular 
life genius to the interpretation. 

As for the Egyptian religion, it not only influenc- 
ed the other nations, but itself spread over the 
classic world. And out of Egypt came our most 
cherished belief, the belief in the life hereafter. 

Backward past the Empire with its great capital 
of the god Amon; past the temple developments 
during the rich feudal conditions of the Middle 
Kingdom, the evening looked to the golden morn- 
ing. The state god Amon had now declined in the 
far highlands of the Upper Nile. For when the 
new state of Egypt had become organized and was 
reaching out and making connections with the 
world in the North, the conservative, priestly 
state of Amon loosed its hold and drew together, 
withdrawing itself further up the Nile, and moving 
its capital beyond the Cataracts. Its written 
language ceased to be Egyptian and has never yet 
been deciphered by the world. There, far away, 
for a time, it continued to exist, gradually perish- 
ing of its isolation; while because it was mysterious 
and out of reach, the Greeks looked upon it as the 
source of all which they knew, perhaps considering 
truly that even as we must advance from the 
known to the unknown, so from the unknown 
must once have proceeded the known. In this 



192 OUT OF EGYPT 

last stronghold perished Amon. Thus ended the 
romance of the Ethiopian Kingdom. 

Neither did Re survive; though the worship of 
this possibly Eastern god of Heliopolis had been 
so predominant, since the Fifth Dynasty were 
established as his sons, that all the kings were sup- 
posed to be his incarnation, and he was therefore 
combined with Amon at Thebes. 

But the first gods of three thousand years before 
— Osiris, Isis and Horus — had lived always in the 
hearts of the people. As the Restoration went 
back to the beginning, it was Osiris, Isis and Horus, 
who alone were resurrected. Just as Egypt had 
summarized her whole past, and was ready to 
hand on her influence, they gave the form which 
she bestowed on the world's religious thought. 



CHAPTER XII 

A Message from the Holy Places 

TO understand the deepest significance of 
Mizraim, to know all that is meant by 
that occult saying, "Out of Egypt have I 
called my son," to realize what is sym- 
bolized by Jesus going down into Egypt and com- 
ing out from thence, we must visit the most holy 
place in the land. It is Abydos, the first sacred 
city, the Egyptian city of the holy sepulchre, the 
place of pilgrimage for more than three thousand 
years of human history. A fitting preparation is 
our own pilgrimage thither, the longest and most 
difficult of all our journeys in this most ancient 
land. Abydos is farther from the highway of the 
river than any other spot which we attempt to see. 
From Thebes we must go back a short way down 
the Nile. We leave by train at dawn to reach the 
nearest railway station and the donkeys. We re- 
turn by train at midnight. One day! — one day 
in the Beginning, the First Day! 

The temple at Abydos is the great Temple of 
Osiris, and is built upon the site of several earlier 
ones. Osiris is now supposed to be the earliest 
god of prehistoric Egypt, a god in human form, 
who with his story, had a mysterious apparent 

193 



194 OUT OF EGYPT 

connection with a possibly earlier god, of a port 
on the Persian Sea. Osiris was the first and the 
last in the hearts of the people. His worship was 
the triumph of a popular belief, and, as we shall 
see, the Truth behind this earliest known religion, 
still persists. 

This is the myth concerning him. 

Osiris was an early and civilizing king- of Egypt, 
who was treacherously slain by his brother Set. 
Isis, the wife of Osiris, found the body, which was 
then torn to pieces by Set; but Isis buried the 
pieces in fourteen places, which we know in history 
as the centres of the ancient nomes. The head 
was buried in Abydos, which thus became the most 
sacred spot. But afterwards Isis, by divine power, 
restored and revivified Osiris. He could no longer 
reign as an earthly king, but went to be the judge 
and ruler of the kingdom of the blessed. As that 
kingdom was in the West, he was called, "The 
first of those in the West," **the King of the 
glorified." And they said of every man, "As 
Osiris lives, so shall he also live." "They depart 
not as those who are dead but they depart as those 
who are living."* 

Isis, remaining upon earth, gave birth to a son, 
Horus, whom she reared as the destroyer of Set 
and of the false slurs which Set cast upon Osiris. 
Thus the special mission of Horus in Egyptian 
mythology, is to take captive the power of dark- 
ness. 

""Breasted's translation. 



MESSAGE FROM HOLY PLACES 195 

This story was probably shaped by actual 
events. 

We have seen how, in historic days in Egypt, 
when a locality triumphs over the rest of the 
country and becomes its capital, and also when 
conquest is carried into other countries, the victory 
is always supposed to be the triumph of the god of 
the capital, who becomes for the time the supreme 
state god. Thus is history told in mythology. 
In view of such historic explanations of later 
stories, we may assume from the myth of Osiris and 
from statements made on temple walls, — as well 
as from recent revelations of prehistoric customs, 
especially with reference to the sacrifice of the 
king — ^that the prehistoric course of events was 
somewhat in the following order: 

Osiris was the first god of Egypt, worshipped in 
the Delta and in Upper Egypt. He was probably 
that king whose civilizing mission was to introduce 
cultivation into the Nile Valley some 8,000 B. C. 
In the story of his sacrifice he sums up the fate of 
all the kings who had a reign of thirty years. Be- 
coming a god in tradition, his worship was the 
monotheism of a tribe. This type of religion is 
always found preceding polytheism, which results 
when tribes unite and neither will give up its god. 
Fourteen centres of Osiris worship are known to 
have existed in prehistoric times, corresponding 
to the centres of the fourteen nomes into which 
Egypt was divided in the earliest dynastic days. 

But there are traces of a very early Asiatic, and 



196 OUT OF EGYPT 

probably Semitic, invasion of the Delta. It is 
even indicated that in days near to the most re- 
mote there was a Semitic principate in HeUopolis. 
These were the worshippers of Set, and it was they 
who killed Osiris in the story. Then a Delta tribe 
of Libyans, akin to the Osirians, and worshipping 
as their tribal goddess, the Virgin Isis, joined with 
the kindred race to conquer Set and reinstate Osiris. 
So, for a time all went well. However, a general 
swift decadence, found in the art of those darkest 
days just before history dawns, indicates a cata- 
clysm. The Asiatics had probably returned in 
force and this was the scattering of Osiris' body. 
This time a tribe came from the south, another 
Libyan tribe, the worshippers of Horus. 

Assuming leadership, they drove the followers 
of Set northward until they had forced them down 
the Red Sea. 

Out of this shadowy development was personified 
the beautiful story, expressing all deepest human 
feelings, telling not only history, but the truths 
which underly all history. 

The three great gods are blended in one story, a 
religion of the people, to touch the hearts of the 
self-conscious world for all time; for at this moment 
history dawns, the dark curtain rolls up, and the 
first historic King steps into the light — Menes, 
coming from near Abydos, and uniting with a 
strong hand Upper and Lower Egypt. He is the 
first King of all Egypt, and the first personage of 
whom records have been kept. 



MESSAGE FROM HOLY PLACES 197 

From this day forth, Abydos is holy ground, in 
which it was the desire of all the great of Egypt 
to be buried. The first stone structure known is 
a tomb at Abydos. As time went on and dynasties 
changed, the kings buried elsewhere,— at Memphis 
in the Old Kingdom, or Thebes in the Empire, — 
and their nobles were with them in the Old King- 
dom. But the bodies were sent to lie on the holy 
ground for a time at least, or tablets were set up 
commending the dead to Osiris. Those whose 
missions north or south took them through this 
city, were able to use the occasion to satisfy their 
own most important personal desire by setting up 
a tablet for themselves, on which they generally 
recorded the chief events of their lives, and the 
mission which brought them to Abydos. Thus 
Abydos became a hoard of historical records and 
details, such as has been opened nowhere else in 
Egypt. Its burials, too, indicate the changes in 
the state; for, in the Sixth Dynasty, the nobles, 
instead of being buried around their ruler, are 
interred away from him, in Abydos. This indi- 
cates that the Old Kingdom was going to its decay. 
In the Middle Kingdom, in the case of a governor 
of a nome, he was buried in his nome, after being 
carried to Abydos. 

In the tribal monotheism of the beginning, a god 
was not thought of as universal, nor was there 
any idea of objection to his affiliation with other 
tribal patrons. When, in the Middle Kingdom, 
out of the confusion of many gods, headed by the 



198 OUT OF EGYPT 

state god Re of Heliopolis, — a confusion which had 
gradually come upon Egypt through the jealousies 
of local priesthoods, — there developed the intuitive 
recognition of one power, to which the priests of 
each locality ascribed the attributes of their god, 
also ascribing to him universal attributes, — then 
Osiris, emerged supreme and it was the first move- 
ment in history toward a monotheism which should 
include the known world. 

This was a prosperous age for Egypt. A new 
temple was built at Abydos. The priests put into 
dramatic form the story of Osiris; and annually, 
at a great festival, enacted it for the people, allow- 
ing them to take some share. Here then, at 
Abydos, some 2,000 B. C, was given the first 
drama of history, similar in intention to the mystic 
plays of the modern Middle Ages, and the Oberam- 
mergau play of today. 

But the most remarkable phase of the religion 
of the triad, Osiris, Isis and Horus, was the inner 
development, the ethical standard which grew up 
in connection with it. The Egyptians, the first 
nation of history, made greater preparation for the 
future life than any other people has ever done. 
And in the very dawn of their history, they per- 
ceived that the future life must depend upon the 
purity of this. At first, as in the case of the He- 
brews later, this was merely a ceremonial symbolic 
purity; but, by the Middle Kingdom and the 
triumph of Osiris, the heart of the people had 
spoken in a conscious and exalted ethical standard. 



MESSAGE FROM HOLY PLACES 199 

It was the ethical character of the life here which 
made the life hereafter. The justification of 
Osiris by Horus was the expression of their intui- 
tive perception of the justification of the righteous. 
The heart was weighed in the balance with Truth 
and was light as the Feather of Truth if it knew no 
sin. This was probably a thousand years before 
such an ethical idea arose in Babylon or Israel. 

Out of the supremacy of this one god, out of 
this ethical standard, developed an advanced con- 
ception of benevolence, which, — since it is the 
high impulse of the Universal working toward 
unity — we perceive as the most advanced and 
impersonal form of love. The inscriptions in the 
tombs of this time, such as that of Ameni at Beni- 
Hassan, while they may be exaggerated in their 
particular application, express the ideal of the 
period. 

Such words as these we find: 

"I gave bread to the hungry, water to the 
thirsty, clothing to the naked, and a boat to him 
who had none." "I was father to the orphan, 
husband to the widow, and a shelter to the shelter- 
less."* 

But the test was hard. With this high develop- 
ment went a danger. The priesthood, for worldly 
power and gain, developed a corresponding evil. 
The answers for the soul, which should carry it 
through the judgment were written out, leaving 
only the name to be inserted, and were sold, thus 

♦Breasted. 



200 OUT OF EGYPT 

insuring the hereafter beforehand. It is this which 
has given us the Book of the Dead; and it is this 
which, in its denial of sins, has provided us with a 
full statement of the standard of the age. Heart 
scarabs were also sold, to lie upon a man's heart 
and prevent it from rising up to testify against 
him. 

After the dark days of the disintegration of the 
Middle Kingdom and of the Hyksos invasion, 
when Thebes had again conquered Egypt, and the 
Empire was born, the worship of Amon-Re, and 
of the other members of the Anion triad, became 
the state religion; courage and conquest, rather 
than benevolence, became the ideal. Yet Thut- 
mose I, conqueror and Emperor, while making 
glorious the Temple of Amon at Thebes, also re- 
stored the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, with great 
splendor and a special endowment for the offering 
of oblations. In his old age he turned toward 
Osiris in the sacred place of Abydos and there 
desired the perpetuation of his name and memory. 

We have seen how, after Ikhnaton's break with 
the conventions, and the near approach of the 
state to an abstract conception in the worship of 
the Aton, Seti I, of the Nineteenth Dynasty, 
carried on the reorganization of the Empire, which 
restored the state gods. He built on the state 
temple to Amon. Yet he also turned his attention 
to Abydos, and erected there a temple to Osiris, 
and to the Osirian triad, as well as to the other 
great gods of Egypt. This seven-shrined temple, 



MESSAGE FROM HOLY PLACES 201 

though much ruined, is in its carvings the finest 
example of the art of Egypt. Some influence of 
the freedom of the revolutionary school remains, 
with the spirit of the Nineteenth Dynasty. In 
Abydos, the strong, free drawing, similar to that 
of Seti's Karnak reliefs, is veiled in the most deli- 
cate modelling, such as we find in the Eighteenth 
Dynasty art; thus combining strength with feeling 
and refinement in a monument of rare charm and 
power. 

Seti also built chapels for the services of the 
kings, dead two thousand years and buried here; 
and a list of the past Pharaohs which he placed on 
a wall, outlines Egyptian history for us today. 

In order to endow this temple, Seti was obliged 
to open an unused route to certain mines back of 
Edfu, and journeyed himself two days into the 
desert to find water that the caravans might live. 

Seti, however, did not finish this beautiful temple 
of Abydos. He died before he could complete it, 
or the great hall in Karnak, or his mortuary temple 
and university, now called "Kurna" at Thebes. 
He was buried in that tomb we entered, the reliefs 
of which are only second to those on the walls of 
this Temple of Abydos. It was left for the son, 
Rameses the Great, the herculean builder of Egypt, 
in whom her glory culminated, to finish not only 
the great hall of Karnak, the mortuary temple of 
Kurna, and the cliff temple at Abu Simbel, but the 
finest of all these, at Abydos, the most holy place, 
the place from near which came the first king of 



202 OUT OF EGYPT 

Egypt, and where that first king is buried. Ra- 
meses undertook this work early in his reign, but 
left in Abydos the longest record of himseK, with 
those poetic, filial statements in reference to Seti: 

"It was his son who made his name live." 
"Thou shalt be as if thou livest while I reign."* 

But, as we now understand, the great formist, 
the vastness of whose building projects has never 
been equalled, the great maker of stone temples to 
the gods, of whom he felt himself to be one, became 
of necessity the Oppressor. Therefore, this rare 
temple of Abydos bespeaks also the outgoing of 
the Hebrews to receive their message and to give 
it to the world. 

But there is a deeper, more mysterious building 
here, a secret, subterranean temple, with its hid- 
den entrance in the temple of Seti I. It is in 
process of excavation today, because with the final 
raising of the great barrage at Assouan, its founda- 
tions will be flooded. We call it the Osireion, and 
it is unique in Egypt, for it is the secret place 
where was hoarded by the Pharaoh of the Exodus 
the hidden wisdom of Egypt. It tells of the life 
and death and resurrection of Osiris, it symbolizes 
the passage of the soul after death, and it is dedi- 
cated to the "Judge of the Dead." 

From the beginning until the end of Egypt, 
Abydos was sacred. Who can visit it today and 

♦Breast's "Records of Ancient Egypt." 



MESSAGE FROM HOLY PLACES 203 

stand before the broken, beautiful temple — like 
that of the Ramesesum, most spiritual in its de- 
struction, — who can see those tombs of all the 
ages, who can think over the story of Osiris, and 
not be stirred to the depths by the suggestion of 
things which have ever been, things which will 
ever be! 



CHAPTER XIII 

The Haunt of Horns 

BUT the story is not complete, though we 
have found in Abydos, suggestions of 
religious and ritualistic forms which are 
strangely like a prophecy, and there has 
dawned upon us a knowledge that here are things 
which we recognize, so that we have looked with 
awe upon this once sacred city of the world. 

Yet we must journey still further up the river, 
above Thebes; where the sandstone foundation 
of the Nubian desert gives way to the softer 
limestone of the desert of Egypt, and the river 
comes forth, unhindered on its way. Here, about 
seventy miles below the First Cataract, is the town 
of Edfu; and here, for much of the time until the 
great Twelfth Dynasty in the Middle Kingdom, 
was the boundary between Egypt and Nubia. 
Here, also, though there were several other 
centres, is the ancient stronghold of the worship 
of Horus, whence his religion spread to the north, 
when the worshippers of Horus conquered Set, 
and by uniting with the Osirians "justified 
Osiris. " 

There is a fragment of a list of kings, written 
in the Fifth Dynasty, just after the Pyramids 

204 



THE HAUNT OF HORUS m 

were built, when men were already beginning to 
talk of the good days of old, and when they made 
the earliest attempt we know to put together a 
chronological record*. On the broken stone are 
a few prehistoric names, then already nearly a 
millenium old. They form the middle of a line, 
cut off in beginning and end, and without any 
facts in connection with them. These prehis- 
toric kings are known to historic ages, only as the 
''Worshippers of Horus, " and they slowly take 
on in the minds of the people a semi-divinity; 
becoming in tradition the half -gods. 

They had followed the gods, who at first ruled 
Egypt, — Egypt, which was the world. Because 
the people of the first dynasties still remembered 
them as dead kings, they became the Divine 
Dead, or "the Dead," as they are spoken of in the 
history of Manetho, the Greek priest in the latter 
days of Egypt; and they are worshipped in their 
former capitals. 

This association of divinity with kings was also 
a fact of all Egyptian history; due both to a 
story of incarnation, which became established as 
a conventional theory for every king of Egypt; 
and to the belief that the king's soul after death, 
partakes of the nature of Osiris, becomes Osiris. 
By the Eighteenth Dynasty this was said of every 
justified soul. The kings, therefore, provided 
temples for the worship of themselves. 

When Menes, — in Egyptian tradition, as in the 

*The so-called Palenno stone. 



206 OUT OF EGYPT 

records, the first human king, — comes forward 
uniting the land, which had already become 
organized about the two centres of the North and 
the South, it is with the title of "Horus," for was 
he not the successor of the great god, who had also 
once ruled the whole of Egypt? Horus had come 
from the South to drive Set from the land, to vin- 
dicate and establish the goodness of Osiris, whose 
kingdom was now of the future world, and to 
reign on earth in his stead. Wherefore "Horus" 
is the symbol of royalty of this hne who came from 
the South. The sign was the Horus hawk above 
the official name. Later, the Horus hawk 
trampling upon the sign of Set, was also shown. 
Psamtik, the Libyan, with the title of "Horus", 
for the last time drove Set from the land. 

Horus, the beginning of whose wqrship may even 
be contemporaneous with the beginning of that of 
Osiris, went through probably a more confused 
history, with more varied aspects, more combina- 
tions, and thus more modifications than any god 
of Egypt. This is even developed to two Horuses, 
like the two Isoldes of the European legend. The 
sign-word "Horus", indicates "sky", and it is 
possible that two separate sky-gods have become 
confused by the similarity of name. The elder, 
as combined in the story, belonged to Letopolis, 
and was supposed to be a brother to Osiris. At 
Edfu, the younger becomes the elder Horus' son. 
The present temple of Edfu is dedicated to these 
two, and to the wife and mother, Hathor, who was 



THE HAUNT OF HORUS 207 

combined with Isis. But the original Horus of 
Edfu and of Hieraconpolis, his other important 
centre, was an independent sky-god, symbolized 
by the hawk, which was ever the most sacred bird 
of Egypt. The souls of the kings were supposed to 
fly away as hawks, another possible connection of 
the kingship with this hawk-worshipping country 
where it originated. On the boat of Seker, god of 
the dead, who is represented by a mummified 
hawk, are many small hawks which represent the 
souls of the kings. 

It is the hawk-god of Edfu whose place, as the 
conqueror of Set in the Osiris myth, though he was 
originally self-existent, is so strongly established 
that it proves the southern people to have been the 
conquerors of the Set worshippers or tribe. As 
connected with this triumph he is represented with 
a human body, and a hawk head. Upon the walls 
of his temple at Edfu, that victory is actually 
stated to have been a tribal conquest, which is 
an interesting point in connection with this 
building, thfe tradition of the priests confirming 
our belief that the old myth tells a prehistoric 
story. 

Horus, the hawk, the sky-god, is the sun-god 
also. That Winged Sun we know so well above the 
temple gates is the symbol of Horus of Edfu. 
Throughout milleniums of Egyptian history, the 
sun, as the dominant influence on Egyptian 
physical life, was the dominant influence in 
Egyptian religion, especially in the practical and 



208 OUT OF EGYPT 

political affairs of this world. The worship of 
the sun-god in some form was always the state 
religion, and the history of Egypt was a religious 
history. While the first two strong dynasties 
from Thinis, near Abydos, held their sway, it was 
as the "Worshippers of Horus. " With the rise to 
power of a Memphite family tbis worship waned, 
and by the close of the great Fourth Dynasty and 
the coming in of the Fifth, Re of Heliopolis had 
succeeded Horus, as the state god. 

If there were, as seems probable, a predynastic 
Semitic principate at Heliopolis, the rise of Re in 
the Fifth Dynasty would mean that even this god, 
so characteristic of Egypt, came from the East, 
and that his coming was a return of Eastern in- 
fluence. 

It is impossible perfectly to extricate the gods, 
but at the time of Rameses, Re, as Amon-Re, was 
chief, and the theory of the after-life connected 
with him included all others. It was the idea of a 
long journey. At first Re might be the boatman 
to take the soul across to Osiris' Island of the 
Blessed, for that God of the Dead and the members 
of his triad, as well as all the other gods, were 
existing contemporaneously. But in Rameses' 
time the field of Osiris had become but one stage 
in the journey, when the soul accompanied Re 
through the watches of the night. 

One of the symbols of Re was the Winged Sun, 
and the connection of Horus with Re is shown by 
the solar disk placed upon the head of the hawk, or 



THE HAUNT OF HORUS 209 

upon the hawk-headed man, one of the most 
frequent combinations in Egypt. 

The character of Horus as the sun-god coincides 
with his mission in the Osirian myth, to conquer 
darkness. His connection with Re is naively 
explained in a special story. The importance of 
the name to Egyptian minds has been mentioned. 
It was to the Egyptians the idea of the thing, 
without which it could not exist; and the knowl- 
edge of which, therefore, gave power over him who 
answered to it. Isis, by a clever stratagem, dis- 
covered the name of Re and thus obtained his 
two eyes, the sun and the moon, for her child. 
He becomes Hor-merti, "Horus of the two eyes," 
and the sacred eye of Horus becomes the principal 
amulet of Egypt. 

By the dynasty of Rameses, Horus begins to 
assume an entirely human form. It is especially as 
the son of Isis, the holy child, that he appears from 
this time on. In an early and favorite representa- 
tion, common down to Greek days, the boy is 
shown standing upon crocodiles,* holding poison- 
ous reptiles harmless in his clasp. In Ptolemaic 
times he appears on an open lotus flower. But 
the baby, the loved, holy infant, alone or in his 
mother's lap, was the form which gradually took 
precedence of all others. 

The splendor of Re had faded into night. In 
the latter days of Egypt, when the world was 
old, and the priests, those conservers of learning, 

*There is a beautiful example in the Louvre. 



210 OUT OF EGYPT 

were delving into ancient lore for a pure religion, 
hoping a renaissance, they tried to revive the 
worship of Amon-Re. But the only worship 
which had life in it was that earliest worship 
of the Osirian triad, and this now became the sole 
important cult in Egypt and spread out from there. 
Horus had again triumphed. For, not Amon-Re, 
but the holy infant, or the boy, became the most 
frequent figure on the temple walls and in the peo- 
ple's homes. 

This, then is the story of him whose dwelling 
we are to see to-day. As the steamer makes its 
devious way up river, we descry above the palm- 
trees on the west, the great pylons, first as two 
huge, gray rocks, then as the towers of a fortress. 
The temple faces due south, and rises dominant 
over the little town of Edfy, as a mediaeval cathe- 
dral above a mediaeval city. It has been exca- 
vated from the mud of sun-dried brick habitations, 
clinging over and around it, and it stands revealed 
as the most perfect temple remaining in Egypt — 
quite perfect, though a little mosque in the town 
below is falling to decay. A thousand years 
younger than that seven-shrined temple at Abydos, 
this temple of Edfu was onlj^ one hundred and 
fifty years in building. But the priests of the 
Ptolemies' time, who superintended its construc- 
tion, claim that it is built on the same plan as an 
old one on this site, which was erected by that 
Imhotep, of whom we hear so much, the great wise 
man and architect of King Zoser, who also built 
the Step-Pyramid. 



THE HAUNT OF HORUS 211 

With slight variations it is the same old temple 
plan,, the temple plan, which we found first in 
Dendera. Here the forecourt and pylons are 
complete. A girdle wall, built last outside of 
all, runs back from the court, securely enclosing 
the temple proper. It was always planned so — 
the whole temple facing and centered upon the 
within, and wall after wall outside, making the 
inner ever more inmost. Upon the walls of Edfu 
the Victories have passed away, for the Ptolemies 
did not record their conquests as the Pharaohs 
did. There is only an endless succession of gods 
and offerings. Except for some ancient geogra- 
phy, and the statement that the war between 
Horus and Set was a tribal war, little of interest 
is found written here. We enter between the 
pylons, to the great open court where the people 
thronged about the altar. In the eastern tower 
is a door which leads to a stairway, lighted by 
windows high in the walls, and there we mount 
to the height of 120 feet to overlook the temple. 
There are but two breaks in the roof beyond the 
court; one where a stone or two has fallen into 
the hypostyle hall; the other, a square opening 
above the sanctuary. Behind the hall, the roof 
is considerably lower and surrounded by a parapet. 
Over it, now so bare in the sunshine, once stretch- 
ed a bright awning, making a cool and airy 
place above the heavy building. Like all the 
temples, this once rose aglow with gorgeous 
colors, in the midst of its green palms. 



212 OUT OF EGYPT 

The people offered as best they knew, the best 
to the most holy, — as some men do to-day, — 
gold and silver and precious stones. The temple 
conserved their wealth. 

It is all gone now. The walls are gray and 
empty. Outside, where the gardens bloomed, 
are the bare mounds of mud. And all lies silent 
forever, save when a horde of tourists swarms 
upon it. The temple is indeed a tomb, but with 
still a tomb's suggestion of the Life. 

We go down from the tower to cross the sunny 
court, and pass through the hall of columns and 
through the vestibules. From each side of one 
of these, the corridor goes round the sanctuary, 
but we cross it to stand upon the threshold of 
that holy of holies, where only the holiest in the 
land, the king and the high-priest, might enter 
once a year. How the priests guarded it, even 
from the contamination of their own feet ! Strange- 
ly enough, this inner place of mystery is now 
the lightest spot within the temple. That square 
hole in the roof above it appears almost as by 
intention; and the sun's rays stream into the 
farthest corner upon the shorn and empty shrine. 

We are a small party, lingering for the quiet 
to think, and we realize how the Hebrews, — 
chosen, as they undoubtedly were, — were called to 
come out from the forms with which Egypt 
began and into which she had crystallized, and 
to take the next step, conserving the true Life. 
They kept the temple, leaving out the image 
from its sacred heart. 



THE HAUNT OF HORUS 213 

But here there is only the shell of something 
that once was brilliant. Walls upon walls of 
gray, empty and imageless now. Is no holiness 
in the ancient place that our feet stand here in 
the heart of silence? Yea, for here as elsewhere, 
it is in our own hearts we may find the holy still- 
ness. 



CHAPTER XIV 

The Gift of Egypt. 

WE have not yet reached the final 
destination of our pilgrimage. We 
shall find it at the First Cataract. 
So we return once more to the 
modern life on the steamer, and proceed as far 
as our boat can navigate, arriving at the Port of 
Assouan, a mud flat beside the town. We have 
passed from end to end of the land of Egypt. 
This is the farthest place in the earhest country. 
It is true that when Egyptian Civilization rose to 
the high tide of Empire and even at periods 
before, it overflowed the high lands of Nubia. 
But here was the natural and the established 
political boundary between the southern part of 
Egypt, and the sometime unorganized world 
beyond. Here, at the foot of the Cataract, was 
the ancient "Suan, " or trade-market for the 
whole of the southland. 

In this narrow valley that we have traversed 
for 750 miles from the coast, the Nile has cut its 
canon, nearly a thousand feet below the general 
level of the vast desert plateau, that most ancient 
highland to be raised above the water, stretch- 
ing across Northern Africa and Central Asia; 

214 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 215 

has spread rich soil for the green crops on the 
floor of the canon; and provided, not only life, 
but a means of communication to bind together 
the people on its banks. In this cradle was the 
Beginning, with the breath of the pure desert in 
it; secured by the desert's walls and a further 
line of the desert mountains on the east, which 
guard it against invasion, even by clouds; protec- 
ted on the northern end by the smooth coast of 
the seven-mouthed Delta, having no harbors; and 
on the south by this rocky barrier to navigation. 
Standing out alone in the desert, protected by 
it until they were strong enough to come forth 
and to wage combat — thus arose and looked about 
them the men of the first nation, with their early 
government, — a nation apparently alone in the 
desert of the world. 

It is this protection in the narrow valley, with 
the gates at the north and the south, which, 
forbidding any sudden great invasion, has pre- 
served the Egyptian type. 

The geography of Egyptian children must have 
been simple. In this unique country, to "go up" 
was to leave the snug valley, "to descend" was to 
come home. The first idea of north was "down- 
stream, " and when the Egyptians had crossed the 
desert, and discovered the Euphrates, they called 
it the "inverted water," for they were accustomed 
to going upstream to the south. Here at this First 
Cataract, the large palm-covered island of Ele- 
phantine, which leads the van of granite elevations 



216 OUT OF EGYPT 

that trouble the waters and seem tumbling down 
the river — was known as the "Door of the South. ' ' 

It was the seat of adventurous nobles, who 
often fared forth with their troops into darkest 
Africa. Their tombs are in the cliffs on the west- 
ern shore of the river. On the eastern bank is 
Assouan, the ancient "Suan, " now for Europeans, 
the health-resort par excellence in Egypt. The 
winds which blow over it still pass over hundreds 
of miles of clean, pure desert, unpolluted by 
organic life. On the island of Elephantine is a lux- 
urious modern European hotel with its gardens; 
on the shore opposite, a line of modern houses, 
shutting out of sight the cramped village of the 
modern natives. A little further upstream, in a 
small bay of the river, is another luxurious hotel 
establishment. 

In our search for the things of the Past, we are 
still interested by the way. Assouan bears the 
mark of a border town, a trading-market between 
different regions. Today the river street of the 
place gives us a greater variety of living interest 
than almost any street in Egypt. Between the 
trees which border it, we look down upon a mud 
flat or beach below, while the little boats, the 
bright colored feluccas of the natives, under sail 
and oars, ply back and forth between the shore and 
Elephantine. On the street itself we are over- 
whelmed by donkeys and camels with importunate 
drivers. The donkeys and the boys seem quite fa- 
miliar ; but the camels are taller than those we know, 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 217 

and are white except where decorated with henna. 
They appear more than ordinarily ill-natured; 
and after watching one askance, as he performed 
a sort of spinning dance, in the middle of the 
road, endeavoring to rid himself of a rider, we 
decided to hold our ambitions in check. The 
owners of these animals are the Bicharines, whose 
camp outside of Assouan is one of the sights of 
the locality. It is a large group of huts, made of 
mats; and in front of each primitive dwelling are 
children playing and one of these white camels, — 
with a leg tied up to prevent his running away. 
The Bicharines are totally unlike the Egyptians, 
blacker, and always dressed in white; their distin- 
guishing characteristics are their mops of hair 
and their pride. Sometimes the hair of girls is 
done in a hundred braids, standing out like flame. 
They are all tall and straight as American Indians, 
and perhaps would bear civilization as ill. Yet 
there seems a native nobility, something fine 
about such natures, something freer than could be 
found in any civilization. 

We, ourselves, experience a small instance of 
their pride. Tourists have been requested in 
notices posted everywhere by the government, 
not to give bakshish, since it spoils industry and 
pauperizes the natives. Before going up the Nile, 
we made enquiries of photographers as to the pro- 
per amount to give for posing; and from a grocery- 
shop supplied ourselves with the small coins in 
use among the natives. One day, as we are 



218 OUT OF EGYPT 

passsing through the streets of Assouan, three 
Bicharine boys, catching sight of the camera, as 
children always do, instantly fling themselves into 
position for a picture. It is over in a second, and 
several coins given to each boy. But they have 
been accustomed to fees, which equal the price of 
a day's "work in excavating; and the leader, like a 
little lord, marches up magnificently and lays his 
coins in my friend's hand. The others, not to be 
outdone, follow suit. "Very well, " says my friend, 
" Thank you for the picture." If they are taken 
aback, they make no sign, but proudly walk away. 

Back of the river street of Assouan, in the native 
town, are fascinating native bazaars, small, open 
shops, indicating greater poverty and simplicity 
than those of Cairo. Their wares are largely 
Nubian and Sudanese, of less value, and yet for 
that very reason more rare, than the Egyptian 
scarves and jewelry, imported over Europe. We 
remember the old trade-routes into Nubia for 
ivory and treasure, and how once the control of 
them all was put with great ceremony into the 
hands of one man, who was called the "Keeper of 
the Door of the South"* 

There is much of very ancient interest about 
Assouan. Here ancient astronomers observed in 
a well that the sun at this point cast no shadow at 
noon; and used the knowledge as a basis for cor- 
rect earth -measurements. Over on Elephantine 
is an old Nilometer, which still marks the rise and 

♦Breasted. 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 219 

fall of the river. Near to Assouan are the granite 
quarries, which fill us with awe as the place whence 
so many wondrous forms came forth, associated 
with all the jubilees of the Pharaohs of Egypt. 
Particularly was the granite cut for the thirty year 
jubilee, so imposingly celebrated in the Eighteenth 
Dynasty, but apparently a development of the 
thirty year jubilee and sacrifice of the king in pre- 
historic times, out of which came the details of the 
burial of Osiris. 

In the time of the Empire, every jubilee was 
the occasion for an expedition under a competent 
officer to secure granite obelisks from these 
quarries. One such block, whose story is unknown, 
still lies by the old road. 

Such an expedition to the border was an affair 
of peace, as was the trade with the Southland, 
but the portal whence this trade came in was the 
"Door" through which all the expeditions of 
conquest in the south went out, re-entering victor- 
ious. And the records of all these various kinds 
of missions, from the earliest days until the end, 
were written by king and commander, a lasting 
memorial, on the rocks in the midst of the river. 

Yet the interest of all these things grows pale in 
the significance of on^. Here is not only the an- 
ciently supposed source of the inundation and a 
present source of health, but a shrine of something 
deeper. Five miles from Assouan, at the upper 
end of the islands which made the Cataract, is 
an island gem which holds the secret, — ^Philae, the 



220 OUT OF EGYPT 

pearl of Egypt, "the most beautiful and the most 
historic little island in the world." 

The great dam is between us and Philae — and 
already this island is vanishing. We may plan 
our journey to it in various ways. The most 
interesting method, if it be desired to crowd all 
into one day's travelling, is to go by donkeys past 
the old quarries to "Shellal," — ^the Arab name 
for Cataract — an Arab town, which is opposite to 
Philae; and taking a felucca there and back, to 
return on the donkeys by way of the great barrage. 
But the donkey-boys of Assouan appear quarrel- 
some and disorderly to us; there is no Aboudi, and 
we left our friends at Luxor when we came on this 
pilgrimage. So we set out by train for Shellal, on 
the small branch road, which carries goods past 
the Cataract and dam. Having dispensed with 
the troublesome offices of a dragoman, we nearly 
fall into the hands of the vociferous felucca rowers 
at Shellal. We do not go to the Holy Isle in the 
barque of the sun-god Re. Most fortunately for 
us, we come upon a little company of old friends 
from America, who take us in with them. 

But, — where is Philae, the remote little island, 
famous to the ends of the earth? Here and there 
above the river wave the heads of slender palm 
trees. They are up to their necks in water, and 
we wend our picturesque way among them. Then 
we come upon a graceful little building, like and 
yet unlike the pictures with which we have been 
familiar since childhood — the small kiosk, called 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 221 

by the natives, "Pharaoh's Bed." It was unfin- 
ished. Was it perhaps intended for a temple after 
that very perfect style, the cella temple, brought in 
under Amenhotep III? Even if so, today it is 
empty of a sanctuary and looks up to the open 
sky. There are only, upon a small rectangular 
wall, the graceful columns, each capital different 
from all the rest. Terraced walls have held the 
earth in a firm base below it, groups of palm trees 
cluster lovingly about it. But there is no island 
visible today, nothing but tufted bits of unusual 
heights, and the waving crests of the palms. Our 
felucca glides on and we find ourselves within the 
enchanted enclosure, the empty rectangle of 
pillars set against the blue of water and sky. Be- 
fore we have more than caught the vision, we have 
passed through it, out upon the expanse of waters 
over the site of the sacred isle. 

Going southward, we appear before the entrance 
to the temple of the island. Since earliest times 
this place is supposed to have been sacred to Isis. 
It is the Temple of Isis that we have come to see. 
Not so large not yet so perfect as the Temple of 
Horus at Edfu, and built at as late a day, this 
temple is still unfinished, but its exquisite surroun- 
dings and the fresh coloring within its chambers 
have long given modern travellers the most 
comprehensive impression of a temple in its 
living beauty — when Egypt was Egyptian. The 
life seems not wholly gone. And now the waters 
have crept up softly, almost stealthily, and have 
flowed into it. 



222 OUT OF EGYPT 

The temple plan was slightly modified to suit 
the contour of the island. The forecourt before 
the first pylon, is almost a triangle. Our little 
boat, a bright note of color, enters at the narrower 
end, and we float between the colonnades, almost 
beside the capitals. Behind the long Hne to our 
left is the river wall. We pass through the first 
pylon, where the rowers pause on their oars, that 
we may see in the gateway the tablet which 
commemorates Napoleon's visit to the island. A 
small door in the face of the left pylon tower leads 
into the birth chapel, which forms one side of the 
inner court. Across this second court, we reach 
the second pylon, set at a slightly different angle 
to the first. The doorway leads into the hypostyle 
hall, and thus to the holy of holies, with its 
chambers beyond. Even here the water has 
slipped over the floor and now forbids us; the 
rich, soft, beautiful colors of the flower capitals 
are reflected by it, as we look within from our 
boat. This reflective water, like a self-conscious - 
ness is significant, and perfects while it destroys 
the temple. 

In the pylon tower at our left is a narrow 
passage, where a loose board-walk permits our 
stepping over to the stair, and so we ascend to the 
roof, or, climbing further, to the top of the pylon. 
We two slip away to visit the little chapel of 
Osiris, tucked in a corner of the roof, and open to 
the sky. We descend a few steps to examine the 
exquisite reliefs which tell the story, probably 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 22S 

the oldest story known. Afterward, from the 
pylon, we look over the waters: — southward into 
Nubia; east to Shellal, beyond the little kiosk; 
close on our west to Bigeh, an island once also 
consecrated; and far to the north, where we descry 
a long, cold line of masonry. There is the evi- 
dence that it is modern mechanics which has laid 
a cold hand on the sacred little island, to destroy 
it. 

But the secret of Philae is already possessed. 

Leaving the soft light from the firmaments 
above and below us, and descending the narrow, 
dark stairway in the temple, we re-embark in 
our gay little boat, with its swarthy Egyptian 
rowers, and again float out upon the waters, 
looking backward all the way. And first the 
reflections, the colors, and the shadows of the dim 
hypostyle hall with the chambers behind and be- 
yond it, are lost to view, leaving the doorway dark 
— ^for it is open. The dark doorways, one behind 
another, always suggest a mystery. We are alone 
with the temple, and the ripples from our oars 
seem to caress the walls and columns. Across 
the court, past the birth chapel, we move, and 
through the outer doorway, gain the outer court, 
whose colonnades seem all but to meet before us. 
But we glide between the long lines and out at the 
entrance. The temple is behind us. 

The felucca turns north along the temple wall, 
passing between Bigeh and Philae. Palm-trees, 
rocks, desert cliffs and water make a picture of 



2^4 OUT OF EGYPT 

unconquered and forbidding Nature. But as 
Philae is lost to us, we come into view of the great 
barrage. It is the stone wall against which the 
waters of the Past have beat in vain, for it hoards, 
the material water by means of which the life of 
the Present takes form. 

It is a vast lake which the great dam keeps 
back. When we reach the line of masonry, we 
can go no further, and leaving our boat, climb by 
steps up the wall. Here small hand trolleys await 
us, the seats like those in a trap, back to back. We 
are trundled merrily along the top of the wall for 
over a mile ; near us on one side, the sight of the 
water; below us on the other, the sound of a 
hundred falls. Now and then we are permitted 
to alight and look over the parapet, where the 
water gushes out through the openings which are 
all arranged at different heights to break the strain, 
and are regulated by gates. 

At the further end, are the house of the engineer 
and a smaller building, where, once more, the 
ubiquitous Cook provides for the wayfaring man. 
But we have our lunch with us; and another 
felucca waits below to take us through the lock. 
Again we sail forth. Our twelve happy-natured 
rowers, one a child with a child's enthusiasm over 
helping, chant weirdly with the rhythm of the 
oars. As their clear-cut faces swing back, we are 
grotesquely reminded of their forefathers in the 
Cairo Museum. When the boat is at rest in the 
dock, they give up to their singing, beating upon 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 225 

small drums made of gourds. To their religious 
chant, we lightly pass the place where a few years 
ago natives risked their lives to earn a living by 
the sport of shooting the Cataract on logs. They 
are at home in the water, these people. A small 
black boy swims out to us on a log, claiming 
piastres for doing it. Childhood is merry in 
Egypt. Child voices sing like birds over the 
hard labor of excavating. We wind our way 
among the rocks, which so unmoved, create such 
tumult. These are the rocks of records so full, 
that were all Egypt washed away, they might 
still tell a continuous story. They are strangely 
black above the water. We turn into a channel 
between two islands, and draw up to a small 
beach, which lies serenely basking towards the 
southern sun. This is the island of Sehel, and 
upon it is an inscription viewed with wonder and 
awe by students of Hebrew story. 

The line of a crack drawn clear across the rock 
does not cancel its weather-beaten record of a 
seven year's famine in Egypt. The story relates 
how the river failed to rise for seven years and 
how the king summoned his wise man who advised 
a sacrifice to the Potter-god of the Cataract. The 
sacrifice was answered by the inundations, and 
the land of the Cataract was consecrated to 
Khnum. This was, perhaps, a thousand years be- 
fore the time of Joseph, in the reign of that king 
Zoser, whose tomb is the Step-Pyramid, and who 
is reported to have built the first temple of Horus 



226 OUT OF EGYPT 

at Edfu. The record of the tradition was 
written much later by the priests of Khnum, in 
support of their claim to the region. But it 
shows that such famines were not unthinkable, 
indeed had occurred in Egyptian experience. 

From the beach of Sehel we climb the venerable 
and broken rocks, above which waves the grass — 
and last year's seeds. They are blown with the 
sand. In a windswept corner of the shelf we 
spread our lunch. Chancing to look below, we 
see on the beach, beyond the empty boat, a line 
of mats on which twelve rowers kneel in prayer. 
It is their first moment of rest since the noon 
hour. Here away in the sight of the God of 
nature, such prayer seems not to resemble the 
self-conscious praying of the street corners. 
Religion is still the secret of Egypt. 

As the sun moves westward we start once more, 
"If this were anywhere but Egypt, I should say it 
was going to rain, " exclaims one of our party; and 
almost before the words are spoken — the rain comes. 
The rowers spring to the curtains; but sharply as it 
began, just so suddenly it is over, the one shower 
of three years, which will ever after serve to date 
our pilgrimage to Philae. 

One more stop we make, this time at the old 
Nilometer on Elephantine, by the steps of which 
we climb to the green surface of the island. Here 
at the "border" of Egypt, in the time of Jeremiah 
and after,' lived the Jewish colony, whose houses 
have just been excavated by French and German 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT ft7 

expeditions. From Elephantine, we return, tired 
out, to modern tea at Assouan. 

But our thoughts turn back to the temple, and 
what it signifies. They watch the creeping destruc- 
tion of the water. Long before Moses was forced 
to look for water in the wilderness that was the 
task of the Egyptians, and has been, as we have 
seen, ever since. Their river furnishes an initial 
supply, but they must learn how to conserve it 
ere they can use it. This was their first practical 
problem and out of it practical mechanics was 
born in the dawn of human history. Working 
upon that same problem today, the engineers of 
one of the most advanced of modern nations, have 
constructed here, at the farthest place in the land 
of Egypt, the greatest barrage in the world. 

It pays the interest on Egyptian bonds; it does 
a greater and more vital thing, it brings life to the 
people of the land of Egypt today. But the 
government and the engineers — do they know 
what they do in placing it here? Do they know 
what this beautiful temple, soon to be merely a 
mound of earth and stones, really is? The shrine 
of the idea of holy motherhood in the world ! 

Just before the Christian era dawned, this old- 
est story of all had gained its strongest hold upon 
the people, and that phase of it, the motherhood of 
Isis, was the phase most loved, most often repre- 
sented, most dwelt upon, — ^the thought which was 
worshipped here. Isis and Horus, divine mother 
and child, lived in the hearts of the people, and 



««8 OUT OF EGYPT 

so strong was this worship that it spread to Rome, 
and with Rome to all the conquests of the Roman 
Empire, — preparing a way. Then arose Christian- 
ity in Asia. 

The supreme message of the Jews was brought to 
consciousness and fulfilled to the. world. The 
trust for which they were developed and cherished 
and chastened for centuries, was not for themselves 
alone, but in the fulness of time for the uplifting 
of humanity. When the Jews had given birth 
to this consciousness, their own protecting husks 
of formalism were destroyed by it. But it was 
back in Alexandria, that Christianity took strong 
root, and swept from end to end of Egypt, and 
out into the world. No teacher has ever presented 
such an ethical standard as Jesus. Yet it was in 
Egypt, not in the old state religion of Re or Amon- 
Re, but in the earliest religion of the people, — the 
story of Isis, Horus and Osiris, — that the form 
was established. Eg>^t, always crystallizing 
forms, did so, above all, in the realm of ideas. Her 
gods had become concentrated, they were now 
transformed, as a dream changes to the reality 
which it still overshadows. Christianity came 
forth with all the elements of the Egyptian story, 
and developed similar accompanying ideas of 
monasticism, and of organized priesthoods and 
ritual. 

The priesthoods of Egypt, especially those of 
Isis, had undoubtedly low forms of attracting the 
people; they had developed an unworthy side of 



THE GIFT OF EGYPT 229 

secret mysteries, and that great evil of perverting 
truth by forms of psychic magic. In Europe the 
worship of Isis, as Isis, came into strong combat 
with early Christianity. 

But gradually the ideas of Christianity in 
Europe underwent a transformation. 

In the religion of Egypt we find not only 
heaven and hell, but the monasticism, mysticism 
and dreamy abstractions of later Christianity, 
which undoubtedly came from this source and for 
the development of which we cannot credit the 
pure and simple precepts of Jesus. The life of 
Christendom as a whole has not rested in these 
forms — on the other hand, it has never yet reached 
the full depth of those simple, vital teachings, 
which reveal the inmost source of active life. 

The Coptic Church, the Church of Egypt, and 
the oldest Christian Church still in existence, 
destroyed in Egypt the old temples, though the 
worship of Isis, enthroned in this remote island, 
continued as her worship until the Fifth century 
of the Christian era. 

As in other nations, before there was thought of 
woman's inferiority, so in Egypt, "the classic 
home of woman's power," woman's counsel and 
decisions in affairs of state were supposed to be 
divine. Just as Egypt was about to pass on her 
message to the world, not only did the royal 
descent through mother and daughter, assume if 
possible, greater importance than ever, but the 
High Priesthood of Amon belonged to a woman 



^0 OUT OF EGYPT 

and descended in the royal female line; while at 
the same time the worship of motherhood in Isis 
had become almost alone in its supremacy. Then 
Isis, earliest form of the eternally true ideal of a 
mystic Motherhood, purified from the evils at- 
tending her worship, rose into the Christian 
Madonna. 

Breasted sees in the revival of Egypt and in 
the Osirian story, the preparation for doctrinal 
Christianity; Petrie says, "The Hebrews might give 
us the pure Virgin Mary, they could never have 
given us the glorified Madonna." 

But let us understand the reason. Is it not 
because Egypt, the first nation of history, the 
beginning of the continuously developing material 
civilization of the West, stands therefore above 
all for Form, and so gives form to all that is to 
follow? 

It was the idea enshrined here, of holy Mother- 
hood, which, like a symbolic prophecy, prepared 
Egypt to receive Christianity, and which, trans- 
formed by Christianity, continues to influence 
the world. "Out of Egypt have I called my son, " 
is an Eastern saying of deep, occult wisdom. As 
Egypt represents the material and objective reason- 
ing which has been most strongly developed in 
the West and in the masculine nature, is not this 
idea of sonship the symbol subconsciously given, 
which represents the objective or Form, recogniz- 
ing its source in the subjective or Life? 



CHAPTER XV 

Light 

THE Sphinx of Egypt represents the king- 
dom of the material world. At the feet 
of the Sphinx we looked upon Form, the 
objective idea of God, as his outer mater- 
ial realm. 

It sends us dreaming, back before the Past. 
When the world was formed, and when the uni- 
verse achieved, had risen to consciousness, Man 
stood there at the gate, beginning his long pilgrim- 
age to God upon the outside. By objective knowl- 
edge, which for a time seems partly to separate 
him from the Creator, he goes back through God's 
whole expressed creation, the realm of symbols, 
the world of Form, in order that he may consciously 
know when at last, in that holy of holies, farthest 
within himself, he finds the God whom he has felt 
behind the veil. 

With the first written word was thought given 
a limiting, conventional form. This earliest na- 
tion, while still full of subjective feeling, had to 
make the beginning of objective knowledge from 
the most outward plane; and to give the thought 
its outer form or symbol, that it might be conveyed 
from soul to soul by way of sense to sense. In the 

231 



OUT OF EGYPT 



early myths of Egypt we find the importance of 
the Name, the word standing for the idea of the 
thing and thus representing its soul. In the days 
of the Empire there developed the belief in the 
Word, the expression of a definite thought, as the 
means of creation. It is similar to the later Greek 
doctrine of the "Logos," to the ''God said" of 
the Hebrew Genesis, and the "Word" of the Greek- 
influenced addition to the Hebrew Scripture. 

In the beginning was simple, graphic language 
with the heart in it; true poetry, dealing with the 
universal individual. But a written word is a 
reflection, making men conscious of their thought. 
Therefore was the beginning of writing the awak- 
ening of the soul's self -consciousness. Then was 
the Truth enshrined in a garden of symbols, even 
as the Spirit is enshrined in the temple of Man's 
body. 

Every word is itself a symbol, as we can see in 
Egypt, where the process of creating signs for 
writing, is revealed in the records of centuries. 

The nation could not have come into being until 
the creation of a system of writing was first 
achieved. The government could not otherwise 
have carried on any wide-spread administration. 
Egypt had developed not only syllables, but an 
alphabet of twenty -four letters, 2,500 years before 
any other people.* The office of the scribe 
became the most exalted in Egypt. Not yet over- 
whelmed with the making of many books, nor 

*Breasted. 



LIGHT 23S 

with the multipHcity and vanity of words, they 
cherished each written treasure, their wonder at 
its existence not yet passed away. Thus began 
objective history — one continuous growth, with 
a long period of preparation behind it. The flow- 
ering of our civihzation has been, after all, so brief, 
from Egypt until now, — ^the shining of the con- 
sciousness of the race into self-consciousness. 

Egypt, still subjective, was beginning with the 
outermost. Therefore her strange perversions, her 
strange combination of extremes, of intense reli- 
gious feeling with the most conventional forms, 
wrought into stone temples such as the world has 
never seen — they are today most valuable for the 
writing on the walls. Translated into modern 
languages, Egypt's records now can never be lost. 
This early nation was the most conservative, hold- 
ing fast to things both good and bad. The Truth 
was enshrined in symbols, and the symbols were 
cherished as the Truth. 

We have read the story of the state religion, and 
how there went with it all the forms of a religious 
calendar, with its feast days, and an elaborate 
ritual; and how the state was under the control 
of the form of its religion, until the religious form 
absorbed the state . There were the soldiers, or con- 
quering class ; the priests, or conserving class ; and the 
Third Estate, the workers, the body of the people. 
The priesthoods not only possessed enormous 
revenues, but endowments of land exempt from 
taxation, as did the bishoprics of the modern 



2S4 OUT OF EGYPT 

Middle Ages. As the English king today is the 
head of the English Church, so was the Pharaoh 
the nominal head of the rehgion of Egypt. 

But it is not only in the outer observances, 
nor in the word alone that we see the forms we 
know. We find such forms in the ideas them- 
selves. Such symbols as the Potter, for God 
the Creator, which we may use, were actually 
pictured in Egypt; such an aspect of God was 
separately personified. We find also the deluge, 
the serpent of evil and the flames of hell, against 
which a ritual prayer was uttered by the priests of 
Karnak every morning. The idea of a divine 
Fatherhood, glimpsed in a distorted fashion and 
scarcely grasped as universal; the resurrection of 
Osiris; the Madonna idea in Egypt — were they 
not symbols arising from and predicting everlast- 
ing Truth .f^ Is not Form the symbolic expression 
of Truth? 

Does a knowledge of these matters disturb us 
by a change of thought which tempts us, not 
only to cast all these things away, since we find 
them what Moses himself once cast off, but with 
them what, in our own religion, they now suggest .^^ 
Shall we, in our pride of knowledge, throw away the 
spiritual kernel because we think we know the 
intellectual husks? Shall we not rather see in 
these early symbols, at once a confirmation, 
and a suggestion that the Truth lies deeper than 
we have yet known? Not only are observances 
symbolic, but ideas themselves express the inner 
Truth. 



LIGHT 235 

In the light of our Christian era the form of 
our rehgion does appear to go back behind the 
Jews to that story which grew out of the earhest 
consciousness of mankind and which prepared 
the way, the story which was itself transformed 
by Christianity. The Christian religion of the 
Western world had its beginning, not in the East, 
from whence came its life, but in the earliest 
nation of history, the first nation of the West, 
the first of the material, masculine part of the 
world which has held the ideal of conquest and 
has worshipped womanhood. The exaltation of 
woman, which culminated in the idea of the 
glorified Madonna, was not, as some historians 
think, the weakness of Egypt. It was due to 
the fact that Egypt was West, was material, was 
masculine; and its purpose was deep as the founda- 
tion of humanity. The idea of the Madonna 
made Christianity acceptable and understand- 
able to the young masculine civilization of Europe. 
The Egyptians looked ever to the West, as the 
land toward which they were to pass. They 
spoke of Osiris as "the first of those in the West". 
That they saw the West as the land of Death 
was itself symbolic, since it is the land of Form, 
while the East is the land of Spirit or Life. 

But for us the wonder has grown with the 
realization that back in the time of Moses there 
was hidden away in the dark secret places on 
the westward side of Egypt, dreams which, though 
distorted, seem like prophecy; that these dreams 



^36 OUT OF EGYPT 

waxed strangely strong above all others in the 
hearts of the people just before the light dawned 
in the East, and so Egypt, the earliest of nations, 
was prepared to welcome and establish Chris- 
tianity and to pass it on with all her great influence 
to the Western world. 

So we think of Egypt as the builder of the 
Temple, symbolized by the actual temple form 
which that nation gave to the world, the temple 
form which Israel later had. So also, Egypt 
stands for the image of each attribute of God, 
and for the preservation of the material body as 
the essential to immortality. All religion is the 
outer expression of man's inner consciousness of 
God. But the Egyptians, as we have seen, began 
their search for God upon the outside, piling up 
the stones in temples, — ^in which they imprisoned 
and corrupted their faith. 

Moses took the next great step toward inner 
Truth when he led his Semitic people out of the 
land of Rameses, cast off the images, and gave 
them the Divine Law instead. 

It remained for Jesus, the perfect culmination 
of his race, to reveal the Spirit behind the Law. 

We can only know Truth as it is individualized 
in some personal experience, yet the Truth itself 
is not in those outer historical facts of experience 
or personality which may be disputed, it is within 
and universal. 

The Story of Jesus, heralded milleniums before, 
and repeated in many religions, is a universal 



LIGHT 287 

story, more deeply true than any facts of history, 
truer than any of the relative facts known in 
our octave of scientific perception. 

Science, which belongs to the West, explains 
from the outside; as religion, from the inside. 
Science should be symbolic of religion, even as 
the material form is expressive of the inmost. 
And now science itself is literally unearthing these 
dreams which belong to the earHest records of 
Time; this prehistoric story which curtains a great 
Truth. 

Has not the world at last reached that stage in 
the great rhythm of human consciousness, when 
it can go back to the images Moses cast off, and, 
separating them from perverted observances, 
read their real significance.^ 

The West, the objective consciousness, is now 
the self -consciousness of the world. And one of 
the great interests of our age has been the explor- 
ation of this oldest, buried civilization, which, 
sealed away for thousands of years, shall achieve 
immortality through the lessons it gives to us. 

Wonderful indeed that the first civilization 
should have grown up in this valley, that the earli- 
est records might be given to this most perfect 
climate in the world for preservation; wonderful, 
that its people should have built more largely 
and strongly than any others, that they should 
have spent their existence to preserve the bodies 
of their dead and their "houses of eternity!" 
The speed of history is accelerated now, and we are 



«S8 OUT OF EGYPT 

hurrying Time with steam and electricity to 
catch each moment. And what will happen — now 
that we have unearthed the Past, and exposed it 
to destruction? 

Is it not that all our return to the first stage of 
development from which we have become separated 
through change of material forms, must be a 
return to the spirit? 

The treasures may not last another hundred 
years; and our age, which has learned to read, 
has, in unearthing, destroyed. But is it not 
because our age is ripe for spiritual understanding 
that Egypt, covered and preserved for centuries, 
has been revealed to us, — even though the revela- 
tion mean the destruction of Egypt? 

We two think it over, on the pathless desert, 
while the Sands of Time sweep round us and the 
heavens open above the distant pyramids, for the 
golden afterglow. 

Egypt is an atmosphere of translucent color in 
which we find the ruins of the Past — a partial 
material resurrection out of which develops 
the perfect resurrection of its significance. 

Down by the river the women of Egypt, black- 
draped against the sunset, are drawing water. 
Beautifully developed figures, lithe and strong; 
brilliant eyes, and faces which have become 
strangely familiar, faces which are of the same 
form as those of thousands of years ago. 

As we watch the simple picture of a girl carry- 



LIGHT 289 

ing water, the mystery which runs through all 
of Egypt is explained. 

It is Life which the girl herself carries down 
through centuries of change and serfdom; Life, 
— even through Death, — of which the ancient 
Egyptians were so intensely conscious; which they 
worshipped in animals; worshipped more in their 
own conscious intelligence; for it was Life, in the 
first strong impetus of the Beginning; Life which 
they felt, with the early wisdom of revelation, 
must carry: — as it will, though through centuries 
of oblivion, of servitude and of degradation, until 
an enlightened West shall come to read deeper 
than words, the message of the Past, the message 
of Spiritual Immortality. 



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